Abstract:

Information is captured from a rendered document with a handheld document
data capture device. Electronic information associated with the rendered
document is applied to determine the system's actions and/or behaviors in
response to the data capture. In some embodiments, the electronic
information is markup data or an action map associated with the rendered
document. In some embodiments, an electronic counterpart corresponding to
the rendered document is located, and information associated with the
electronic counterpart is applied to determine actions and/or behaviors
available to a user of the handheld document data capture device.

Claims:

1. A method in a computing system, comprising:receiving text captured from
a human-perceptible textual portion of a printed document using a
handheld information capture device; andin response to receiving the
captured text, determining a plurality of actions that would be
appropriate to perform in response to the capture of the captured text
based on an analysis of the captured text.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:determining a location in the
printed document from which the captured text was captured; andreceiving
information related to the determined location.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein receiving information related to the
determined location further comprises:information related to at least one
of a title, heading, caption, footnote, endnote, or citation.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:determining distances between
the location of the captured information and context points within the
printed document; andselecting an action to be performed based at least
in part on the determined distances.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein selecting an action to be performed
further comprises:determining a likelihood that a user of the handheld
information capture device will select the action.

6. The method of claim 4, wherein the determined distance is at least one
of a word distance, a sentence distance, a paragraph distance, or a
physical distance.

7. The method of claim 4, wherein the context points within the document
are located in at least one selected from the group of a title, a
heading, a photo, an illustration, a caption, a footnote, an endnote, a
citation, a keyword, a name, a location, a phone number, and an address.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising:identifying supplemental
information in the received information; anddetermining the action to be
performed at least in part on the identified supplemental information.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein determining an action to be performed
further comprises:identifying at least one keyword in the received
information;locating the at least one keyword in supplemental information
associated with the printed document; andperforming the action associated
with the located keyword in the supplemental information.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising:receiving supplemental
information associated with the printed document.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising:determining at least one
category to which the printed document belongs; andselecting the action
based at least in part on the determined category.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein determining at least one category
further comprises:referring to categories previously determined for the
printed document.

13. The method of claim 11, further comprising:identifying an electronic
counterpart associated with the printed document; anddetermining the
action based on the identified electronic counterpart.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein receiving information from a printed
document further comprises:receiving information identifying a region the
printed document from which the received information was captured;
anddetermining the action at least in part on the received information
related to the region.

15. (canceled)

16. The method of claim 14, wherein receiving information from a printed
document further comprises:receiving information identifying a type of
the identified region of the printed document.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein receiving information identifying a
type of the identified region of the printed document further
comprises:identifying at least one of an advertising region, a product or
products region, a sports region, a news region, a political region, a
science region, a technology region, a hobby region, an entertainment
region, an opinion region, a finance region, a business region, a
classifieds region, an arts region, a real estate region, or a subject
region.

18. The method of claim 14, wherein determining the action at least in
part on the received information related to the region further
comprises:combining actions determined from more than one region
identified as comprising the captured information.

19. The method of claim 14, wherein determining the action at least in
part on the received information related to the region further
comprises:combining actions determined from regions of more than one
related documents.

20. The method of claim 14, wherein determining the action at least in
part on the received information related to the region further
comprises:combining actions determined from regions of multiple documents
in a document hierarchy.

21. The method of claim 20, wherein the document hierarchy further
comprises:a page within an article within a magazine, a page within a
section within a newspaper, or a page within a chapter within a book
within an anthology.

22. The method of claim 1, further comprising:displaying to a user an
indication of the action to be performed; andupon the user selecting the
action to be performed, performing the determined action.

23. A method in a computing system for providing a choice of actions for
selection by a user, comprising:receiving text captured from a
human-perceptible textual portion of a printed document using a handheld
information capture device;applying markup data associated with the
received text in order to determine a plurality of actions to be
performed; andproviding a menu of choices to the user that includes at
least a portion of the determined plurality of actions.

24. The method of claim 23, further comprising automatically performing
one of more of the determined plurality of actions.

25. A system that performs an action in response to a capture of data from
a printed document, comprising:a hand-held device, the hand-held device
comprising a data capture component that stores human-perceptible textual
data captured from the printed document and a context component that
determines context information that is current at the time of the data
capture; andan action component that receives the captured textual data
and the determined context information and performs an action based on
the received captured data and the received context information.

26. One or more computer memories collectively containing an action map
data structure comprising a plurality of entries, each entry comprising
both (a) information identifying a portion of the text contained by each
of one or more documents, and (b) markup data identifying one or more
actions that are candidates to be performed in response to a user using a
text capture device to capture human-perceptible text from a printed
document among the identified portions of text.

Description:

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

[0001]This application is a Continuation-In-Part of U.S. patent
application Ser. No. 11/004,637 filed on Dec. 3, 2004, which is hereby
incorporated by reference in its entirety.

[0006]Paper documents have an enduring appeal, as can be seen by the
proliferation of paper documents in the computer age. It has never been
easier to print and publish paper documents than it is today. Paper
documents prevail even though electronic documents are easier to
duplicate, transmit, search and edit.

[0007]Given the popularity of paper documents and the advantages of
electronic documents, it would be useful to combine the benefits of both.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

[0008]FIG. 1 is a data flow diagram that illustrates the flow of
information in one embodiment of the core system.

[0009]FIG. 2 is a component diagram of components included in a typical
implementation of the system in the context of a typical operating
environment.

[0010]FIG. 3 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a scanner.

[0011]FIG. 4 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a system to support
document interaction.

[0012]FIG. 5 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a technique to map
capture information to actions.

[0013]FIG. 6 is a flow chart of an embodiment of a process to determine
automatic and selectable actions based upon capture information.

[0014]FIG. 7 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a technique to map
information from multiple sources to actions.

[0015]FIG. 8 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a technique to map
capture information from a document hierarchy to actions.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Overview

[0016]In the system described above, users can subscribe to various
services offered by a service provider. These services support the use of
handheld document data capture devices. Such services can include
communication, transaction intermediation (e.g., providing payment to a
vendor for purchases made by the subscriber with the handheld device),
search, data processing (e.g., network assisted OCR, location
determination, etc.), data archiving (e.g., life library), and many
others. For example, a service provider might provide communication and
search functions for a mobile phone so that it can be used to capture
information from a document and wirelessly communicate the information to
a search engine.

[0017]In one aspect, information is captured from a rendered document, and
markup data associated with the rendered document is applied to at least
in part determine actions and/or behaviors available to a user of the
handheld document data capture device. In some embodiments, electronic
counterparts of the rendered document may be located. Markup data can be
stored, among other locations, in an electronic counterpart to a rendered
document, in a separate document corresponding to a rendered document, in
a database, in a file of metadata associated with one or more rendered
documents. The markup data may include information associated with the
rendered document and/or its electronic counterpart. The markup data may
be applied to determine actions to take on and/or involving the captured
information. Markup data may be applied to determine actions and/or
behaviors available to a user of the handheld document data capture
device and/or actions using and/or involving the electronic counterpart.
Markup data may be applied in a hierarchical manner to determine actions
and/or behaviors available to a user of the handheld document data
capture device and/or actions using and/or involving the electronic
counterpart.

[0018]Part I--Introduction

1. Nature of the System

[0019]For every paper document that has an electronic counterpart, there
exists a discrete amount of information in the paper document that can
identify the electronic counterpart. In some embodiments, the system uses
a sample of text captured from a paper document, for example using a
handheld scanner, to identify and locate an electronic counterpart of the
document. In most cases, the amount of text needed by the facility is
very small in that a few words of text from a document can often function
as an identifier for the paper document and as a link to its electronic
counterpart. In addition, the system may use those few words to identify
not only the document, but also a location within the document.

[0020]Thus, paper documents and their digital counterparts can be
associated in many useful ways using the system discussed herein.

[0021]1.1. A Quick Overview of the Future

[0022]Once the system has associated a piece of text in a paper document
with a particular digital entity has been established, the system is able
to build a huge amount of functionality on that association.

[0023]It is increasingly the case that most paper documents have an
electronic counterpart that is accessible on the World Wide Web or from
some other online database or document corpus, or can be made accessible,
such as in response to the payment of a fee or subscription. At the
simplest level, then, when a user scans a few words in a paper document,
the system can retrieve that electronic document or some part of it, or
display it, email it to somebody, purchase it, print it or post it to a
web page. As additional examples, scanning a few words of a book that a
person is reading over breakfast could cause the audio-book version in
the person's car to begin reading from that point when s/he starts
driving to work, or scanning the serial number on a printer cartridge
could begin the process of ordering a replacement.

[0024]The system implements these and many other examples of
"paper/digital integration" without requiring changes to the current
processes of writing, printing and publishing documents, giving such
conventional rendered documents a whole new layer of digital
functionality.

[0025]1.2. Terminology

[0026]A typical use of the system begins with using an optical scanner to
scan text from a paper document, but it is important to note that other
methods of capture from other types of document are equally applicable.
The system is therefore sometimes described as scanning or capturing text
from a rendered document, where those terms are defined as follows:

[0027]A rendered document is a printed document or a document shown on a
display or monitor. It is a document that is perceptible to a human,
whether in permanent form or on a transitory display.

[0028]Scanning or capturing is the process of systematic examination to
obtain information from a rendered document. The process may involve
optical capture using a scanner or camera (for example a camera in a
cellphone), or it may involve reading aloud from the document into an
audio capture device or typing it on a keypad or keyboard. For more
examples, see Section 15.

2. Introduction to the System

[0029]This section describes some of the devices, processes and systems
that constitute a system for paper/digital integration. In various
embodiments, the system builds a wide variety of services and
applications on this underlying core that provides the basic
functionality.

[0030]2.1. The Processes

[0031]FIG. 1 is a data flow diagram that illustrates the flow of
information in one embodiment of the core system. Other embodiments may
not use all of the stages or elements illustrated here, while some will
use many more.

[0032]Text from a rendered document is captured 100, typically in optical
form by an optical scanner or audio form by a voice recorder, and this
image or sound data is then processed 102, for example to remove
artifacts of the capture process or to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
A recognition process 104 such as OCR, speech recognition, or
autocorrelation then converts the data into a signature, comprised in
some embodiments of text, text offsets, or other symbols. Alternatively,
the system performs an alternate form of extracting document signature
from the rendered document. The signature represents a set of possible
text transcriptions in some embodiments. This process may be influenced
by feedback from other stages, for example, if the search process and
context analysis 110 have identified some candidate documents from which
the capture may originate, thus narrowing the possible interpretations of
the original capture.

[0033]A post-processing 106 stage may take the output of the recognition
process and filter it or perform such other operations upon it as may be
useful. Depending upon the embodiment implemented, it may be possible at
this stage to deduce some direct actions 107 to be taken immediately
without reference to the later stages, such as where a phrase or symbol
has been captured which contains sufficient information in itself to
convey the user's intent. In these cases no digital counterpart document
need be referenced, or even known to the system.

[0034]Typically, however, the next stage will be to construct a query 108
or a set of queries for use in searching. Some aspects of the query
construction may depend on the search process used and so cannot be
performed until the next stage, but there will typically be some
operations, such as the removal of obviously misrecognized or irrelevant
characters, which can be performed in advance.

[0035]The query or queries are then passed to the search and context
analysis stage 110. Here, the system optionally attempts to identify the
document from which the original data was captured. To do so, the system
typically uses search indices and search engines 112, knowledge about the
user 114 and knowledge about the user's context or the context in which
the capture occurred 116. Search engine 112 may employ and/or index
information specifically about rendered documents, about their digital
counterpart documents, and about documents that have a web (internet)
presence). It may write to, as well as read from, many of these sources
and, as has been mentioned, it may feed information into other stages of
the process, for example by giving the recognition system 104 information
about the language, font, rendering and likely next words based on its
knowledge of the candidate documents.

[0036]In some circumstances the next stage will be to retrieve 120 a copy
of the document or documents that have been identified. The sources of
the documents 124 may be directly accessible, for example from a local
filing system or database or a web server, or they may need to be
contacted via some access service 122 which might enforce authentication,
security or payment or may provide other services such as conversion of
the document into a desired format.

[0037]Applications of the system may take advantage of the association of
extra functionality or data with part or all of a document. For example,
advertising applications discussed in Section 10.4 may use an association
of particular advertising messages or subjects with portions of a
document. This extra associated functionality or data can be thought of
as one or more overlays on the document, and is referred to herein as
"markup." The next stage of the process 130, then, is to identify any
markup relevant to the captured data. Such markup may be provided by the
user, the originator, or publisher of the document, or some other party,
and may be directly accessible from some source 132 or may be generated
by some service 134. In various embodiments, markup can be associated
with, and apply to, a rendered document and/or the digital counterpart to
a rendered document, or to groups of either or both of these documents.

[0038]Lastly, as a result of the earlier stages, some actions may be taken
140. These may be default actions such as simply recording the
information found, they may be dependent on the data or document, or they
may be derived from the markup analysis. Sometimes the action will simply
be to pass the data to another system. In some cases the various possible
actions appropriate to a capture at a specific point in a rendered
document will be presented to the user as a menu on an associated
display, for example on a local display 332, on a computer display 212 or
a mobile phone or PDA display 216. If the user doesn't respond to the
menu, the default actions can be taken.

[0039]2.2. The Components

[0040]FIG. 2 is a component diagram of components included in a typical
implementation of the system in the context of a typical operating
environment. As illustrated, the operating environment includes one or
more optical scanning capture devices 202 or voice capture devices 204.
In some embodiments, the same device performs both functions. Each
capture device is able to communicate with other parts of the system such
as a computer 212 and a mobile station 216 (e.g., a mobile phone or PDA)
using either a direct wired or wireless connection, or through the
network 220, with which it can communicate using a wired or wireless
connection, the latter typically involving a wireless base station 214.
In some embodiments, the capture device is integrated in the mobile
station, and optionally shares some of the audio and/or optical
components used in the device for voice communications and
picture-taking.

[0041]Computer 212 may include a memory containing computer executable
instructions for processing an order from scanning devices 202 and 204.
As an example, an order can include an identifier (such as a serial
number of the scanning device 202/204 or an identifier that partially or
uniquely identifies the user of the scanner), scanning context
information (e.g., time of scan, location of scan, etc.) and/or scanned
information (such as a text string) that is used to uniquely identify the
document being scanned. In alternative embodiments, the operating
environment may include more or less components.

[0042]Also available on the network 220 are search engines 232, document
sources 234, user account services 236, markup services 238 and other
network services 239. The network 220 may be a corporate intranet, the
public Internet, a mobile phone network or some other network, or any
interconnection of the above.

[0043]Regardless of the manner by which the devices are coupled to each
other, they may all may be operable in accordance with well-known
commercial transaction and communication protocols (e.g., Internet
Protocol (IP)). In various embodiments, the functions and capabilities of
scanning device 202, computer 212, and mobile station 216 may be wholly
or partially integrated into one device. Thus, the terms scanning device,
computer, and mobile station can refer to the same device depending upon
whether the device incorporates functions or capabilities of the scanning
device 202, computer 212 and mobile station 216. In addition, some or all
of the functions of the search engines 232, document sources 234, user
account services 236, markup services 238 and other network services 239
may be implemented on any of the devices and/or other devices not shown.

[0044]2.3. The Capture Device

[0045]As described above, the capture device may capture text using an
optical scanner that captures image data from the rendered document, or
using an audio recording device that captures a user's spoken reading of
the text, or other methods. Some embodiments of the capture device may
also capture images, graphical symbols and icons, etc., including machine
readable codes such as barcodes. The device may be exceedingly simple,
consisting of little more than the transducer, some storage, and a data
interface, relying on other functionality residing elsewhere in the
system, or it may be a more full-featured device. For illustration, this
section describes a device based around an optical scanner and with a
reasonable number of features.

[0046]Scanners are well known devices that capture and digitize images. An
offshoot of the photocopier industry, the first scanners were relatively
large devices that captured an entire document page at once. Recently,
portable optical scanners have been introduced in convenient form
factors, such as a pen-shaped handheld device.

[0047]In some embodiments, the portable scanner is used to scan text,
graphics, or symbols from rendered documents. The portable scanner has a
scanning element that captures text, symbols, graphics, etc, from
rendered documents. In addition to documents that have been printed on
paper, in some embodiments, rendered documents include documents that
have been displayed on a screen such as a CRT monitor or LCD display.

[0048]FIG. 3 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a scanner 302. The
scanner 302 comprises an optical scanning head 308 to scan information
from rendered documents and convert it to machine-compatible data, and an
optical path 306, typically a lens, an aperture or an image conduit to
convey the image from the rendered document to the scanning head. The
scanning head 308 may incorporate a Charge-Coupled Device (CCD), a
Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) imaging device, or an
optical sensor of another type.

[0049]A microphone 310 and associated circuitry convert the sound of the
environment (including spoken words) into machine-compatible signals, and
other input facilities exist in the form of buttons, scroll-wheels or
other tactile sensors such as touch-pads 314.

[0050]Feedback to the user is possible through a visual display or
indicator lights 332, through a loudspeaker or other audio transducer 334
and through a vibrate module 336.

[0051]The scanner 302 comprises logic 326 to interact with the various
other components, possibly processing the received signals into different
formats and/or interpretations. Logic 326 may be operable to read and
write data and program instructions stored in associated storage 330 such
as RAM, ROM, flash, or other suitable memory. It may read a time signal
from the clock unit 328. The scanner 302 also includes an interface 316
to communicate scanned information and other signals to a network and/or
an associated computing device. In some embodiments, the scanner 302 may
have an on-board power supply 332. In other embodiments, the scanner 302
may be powered from a tethered connection to another device, such as a
Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection.

[0052]As an example of one use of scanner 302, a reader may scan some text
from a newspaper article with scanner 302. The text is scanned as a
bit-mapped image via the scanning head 308. Logic 326 causes the
bit-mapped image to be stored in memory 330 with an associated time-stamp
read from the clock unit 328. Logic 326 may also perform optical
character recognition (OCR) or other post-scan processing on the
bit-mapped image to convert it to text. Logic 326 may optionally extract
a signature from the image, for example by performing a convolution-like
process to locate repeating occurrences of characters, symbols or
objects, and determine the distance or number of other characters,
symbols, or objects between these repeated elements. The reader may then
upload the bit-mapped image (or text or other signature, if post-scan
processing has been performed by logic 326) to an associated computer via
interface 316.

[0053]As an example of another use of scanner 302, a reader may capture
some text from an article as an audio file by using microphone 310 as an
acoustic capture port. Logic 326 causes audio file to be stored in memory
328. Logic 326 may also perform voice recognition or other post-scan
processing on the audio file to convert it to text. As above, the reader
may then upload the audio file (or text produced by post-scan processing
performed by logic 326) to an associated computer via interface 316.

[0054]Part II--Overview of the Areas of the Core System

[0055]As paper-digital integration becomes more common, there are many
aspects of existing technologies that can be changed to take better
advantage of this integration, or to enable it to be implemented more
effectively. This section highlights some of those issues.

3. Search

[0056]Searching a corpus of documents, even so large a corpus as the World
Wide Web, has become commonplace for ordinary users, who use a keyboard
to construct a search query which is sent to a search engine. This
section and the next discuss the aspects of both the construction of a
query originated by a capture from a rendered document, and the search
engine that handles such a query.

[0057]3.1. Scan/Speak/Type as Search Query

[0058]Use of the described system typically starts with a few words being
captured from a rendered document using any of several methods, including
those mentioned in Section 1.2 above. Where the input needs some
interpretation to convert it to text, for example in the case of OCR or
speech input, there may be end-to-end feedback in the system so that the
document corpus can be used to enhance the recognition process.
End-to-end feedback can be applied by performing an approximation of the
recognition or interpretation, identifying a set of one or more candidate
matching documents, and then using information from the possible matches
in the candidate documents to further refine or restrict the recognition
or interpretation. Candidate documents can be weighted according to their
probable relevance (for example, based on then number of other users who
have scanned in these documents, or their popularity on the Internet),
and these weights can be applied in this iterative recognition process.

[0059]3.2. Short Phrase Searching Because the selective power of a search
query based on a few words is greatly enhanced when the relative
positions of these words are known, only a small amount of text need be
captured for the system to identify the text's location in a corpus. Most
commonly, the input text will be a contiguous sequence of words, such as
a short phrase.

[0060]3.2.1. Finding Document and Location in Document from Short Capture

[0061]In addition to locating the document from which a phrase originates,
the system can identify the location in that document and can take action
based on this knowledge.

[0062]3.2.2. Other Methods of Finding Location

[0063]The system may also employ other methods of discovering the document
and location, such as by using watermarks or other special markings on
the rendered document.

[0064]3.3. Incorporation of Other Factors in Search Query

[0065]In addition to the captured text, other factors (i.e., information
about user identity, profile, and context) may form part of the search
query, such as the time of the capture, the identity and geographical
location of the user, knowledge of the user's habits and recent
activities, etc.

[0066]The document identity and other information related to previous
captures, especially if they were quite recent, may form part of a search
query.

[0067]The identity of the user may be determined from a unique identifier
associated with a capturing device, and/or biometric or other
supplemental information (speech patterns, fingerprints, etc.).

[0069]The search query can be constructed taking into account the types of
errors likely to occur in the particular capture method used. One example
of this is an indication of suspected errors in the recognition of
specific characters; in this instance a search engine may treat these
characters as wildcards, or assign them a lower priority.

[0070]3.5. Local Caching of Index for Performance/Offline Use

[0071]Sometimes the capturing device may not be in communication with the
search engine or corpus at the time of the data capture. For this reason,
information helpful to the offline use of the device may be downloaded to
the device in advance, or to some entity with which the device can
communicate. In some cases, all or a substantial part of an index
associated with a corpus may be downloaded. This topic is discussed
further in Section 15.3.

[0072]3.6. Queries, in Whatever Form, May be Recorded and Acted on Later

[0073]If there are likely to be delays or cost associated with
communicating a query or receiving the results, this pre-loaded
information can improve the performance of the local device, reduce
communication costs, and provide helpful and timely user feedback.

[0074]In the situation where no communication is available (the local
device is "offline"), the queries may be saved and transmitted to the
rest of the system at such a time as communication is restored.

[0075]In these cases it may be important to transmit a timestamp with each
query. The time of the capture can be a significant factor in the
interpretation of the query. For example, Section 13.1 discusses the
importance of the time of capture in relation to earlier captures. It is
important to note that the time of capture will not always be the same as
the time that the query is executed.

[0076]3.7. Parallel Searching

[0077]For performance reasons, multiple queries may be launched in
response to a single capture, either in sequence or in parallel. Several
queries may be sent in response to a single capture, for example as new
words are added to the capture, or to query multiple search engines in
parallel.

[0078]For example, in some embodiments, the system sends queries to a
special index for the current document, to a search engine on a local
machine, to a search engine on the corporate network, and to remote
search engines on the Internet.

[0079]The results of particular searches may be given higher priority than
those from others.

[0080]The response to a given query may indicate that other pending
queries are superfluous; these may be cancelled before completion.

4. Paper and Search Engines

[0081]Often it is desirable for a search engine that handles traditional
online queries also to handle those originating from rendered documents.
Conventional search engines may be enhanced or modified in a number of
ways to make them more suitable for use with the described system.

[0082]The search engine and/or other components of the system may create
and maintain indices that have different or extra features. The system
may modify an incoming paper-originated query or change the way the query
is handled in the resulting search, thus distinguishing these
paper-originated queries from those coming from queries typed into web
browsers and other sources. And the system may take different actions or
offer different options when the results are returned by the searches
originated from paper as compared to those from other sources. Each of
these approaches is discussed below.

[0083]4.1. Indexing

[0084]Often, the same index can be searched using either paper-originated
or traditional queries, but the index may be enhanced for use in the
current system in a variety of ways.

[0085]4.1.1. Knowledge about the Paper Form

[0086]Extra fields can be added to such an index that will help in the
case of a paper-based search.

Index Entry Indicating Document Availability in Paper Form

[0087]The first example is a field indicating that the document is known
to exist or be distributed in paper form. The system may give such
documents higher priority if the query comes from paper.

Knowledge of Popularity Paper Form

[0088]In this example statistical data concerning the popularity of paper
documents (and, optionally, concerning sub-regions within these
documents)--for example the amount of scanning activity, circulation
numbers provided by the publisher or other sources, etc--is used to give
such documents higher priority, to boost the priority of digital
counterpart documents (for example, for browser-based queries or web
searches), etc.

Knowledge of Rendered Format

[0089]Another important example may be recording information about the
layout of a specific rendering of a document.

[0090]For a particular edition of a book, for example, the index may
include information about where the line breaks and page breaks occur,
which fonts were used, any unusual capitalization.

[0091]The index may also include information about the proximity of other
items on the page, such as images, text boxes, tables and advertisements.

Use of Semantic Information in Original

[0092]Lastly, semantic information that can be deduced from the source
markup but is not apparent in the paper document, such as the fact that a
particular piece of text refers to an item offered for sale, or that a
certain paragraph contains program code, may also be recorded in the
index.

[0093]4.1.2. Indexing in the Knowledge of the Capture Method

[0094]A second factor that may modify the nature of the index is the
knowledge of the type of capture likely to be used. A search initiated by
an optical scan may benefit if the index takes into account characters
that are easily confused in the OCR process, or includes some knowledge
of the fonts used in the document. Similarly, if the query is from speech
recognition, an index based on similar-sounding phonemes may be much more
efficiently searched. An additional factor that may affect the use of the
index in the described model is the importance of iterative feedback
during the recognition process. If the search engine is able to provide
feedback from the index as the text is being captured, it can greatly
increase the accuracy of the capture.

Indexing Using Offsets

[0095]If the index is likely to be searched using the
offset-based/autocorrelation OCR methods described in Section 9, in some
embodiments, the system stores the appropriate offset or signature
information in an index.

[0096]4.1.3. Multiple Indices

[0097]Lastly, in the described system, it may be common to conduct
searches on many indices. Indices may be maintained on several machines
on a corporate network. Partial indices may be downloaded to the capture
device, or to a machine close to the capture device. Separate indices may
be created for users or groups of users with particular interests, habits
or permissions. An index may exist for each filesystem, each directory,
even each file on a user's hard disk. Indexes are published and
subscribed to by users and by systems. It will be important, then, to
construct indices that can be distributed, updated, merged and separated
efficiently.

[0098]4.2. Handling the Queries

[0099]4.2.1. Knowing the Capture is from Paper

[0100]A search engine may take different actions when it recognizes that a
search query originated from a paper document. The engine might handle
the query in a way that is more tolerant to the types of errors likely to
appear in certain capture methods, for example.

[0101]It may be able to deduce this from some indicator included in the
query (for example a flag indicating the nature of the capture), or it
may deduce this from the query itself (for example, it may recognize
errors or uncertainties typical of the OCR process).

[0102]Alternatively, queries from a capture device can reach the engine by
a different channel or port or type of connection than those from other
sources, and can be distinguished in that way. For example, some
embodiments of the system will route queries to the search engine by way
of a dedicated gateway. Thus, the search engine knows that all queries
passing through the dedicated gateway were originated from a paper
document.

[0103]4.2.2. Use of Context

[0104]Section 13 below describes a variety of different factors which are
external to the captured text itself, yet which can be a significant aid
in identifying a document. These include such things as the history of
recent scans, the longer-term reading habits of a particular user, the
geographic location of a user and the user's recent use of particular
electronic documents. Such factors are referred to herein as "context."

[0105]Some of the context may be handled by the search engine itself, and
be reflected in the search results. For example, the search engine may
keep track of a user's scanning history, and may also cross-reference
this scanning history to conventional keyboard-based queries. In such
cases, the search engine maintains and uses more state information about
each individual user than do most conventional search engines, and each
interaction with a search engine may be considered to extend over several
searches and a longer period of time than is typical today.

[0106]Some of the context may be transmitted to the search engine in the
search query (Section 3.3), and may possibly be stored at the engine so
as to play a part in future queries. Lastly, some of the context will
best be handled elsewhere, and so becomes a filter or secondary search
applied to the results from the search engine.

Data-Stream Input to Search

[0107]An important input into the search process is the broader context of
how the community of users is interacting with the rendered version of
the document--for example, which documents are most widely read and by
whom. There are analogies with a web search returning the pages that are
most frequently linked to, or those that are most frequently selected
from past search results. For further discussion of this topic, see
Sections 13.4 and 14.2.

[0108]4.2.3. Document Sub-Regions

[0109]The described system can emit and use not only information about
documents as a whole, but also information about sub-regions of
documents, even down to individual words. Many existing search engines
concentrate simply on locating a document or file that is relevant to a
particular query. Those that can work on a finer grain and identify a
location within a document will provide a significant benefit for the
described system.

[0110]4.3. Returning the Results

[0111]The search engine may use some of the further information it now
maintains to affect the results returned.

[0112]The system may also return certain documents to which the user has
access only as a result of being in possession of the paper copy (Section
7.4).

[0113]The search engine may also offer new actions or options appropriate
to the described system, beyond simple retrieval of the text.

5. Markup, Annotations and Metadata

[0114]In addition to performing the capture-search-retrieve process, the
described system also associates extra functionality with a document, and
in particular with specific locations or segments of text within a
document. This extra functionality is often, though not exclusively,
associated with the rendered document by being associated with its
electronic counterpart. As an example, hyperlinks in a web page could
have the same functionality when a printout of that web page is scanned.
In some cases, the functionality is not defined in the electronic
document, but is stored or generated elsewhere.

[0115]This layer of added functionality is referred to herein as "markup."

[0116]5.1. Overlays, Static and Dynamic

[0117]One way to think of the markup is as an "overlay" on the document,
which provides further information about--and may specify actions
associated with--the document or some portion of it. The markup may
include human-readable content, but is often invisible to a user and/or
intended for machine use. Examples include options to be displayed in a
popup-menu on a nearby display when a user captures text from a
particular area in a rendered document, or audio samples that illustrate
the pronunciation of a particular phrase.

[0118]5.1.1. Several Layers, Possibly from Several Sources

[0119]Any document may have multiple overlays simultaneously, and these
may be sourced from a variety of locations. Markup data may be created or
supplied by the author of the document, or by the user, or by some other
party.

[0120]Markup data may be attached to the electronic document or embedded
in it. It may be found in a conventional location (for example, in the
same place as the document but with a different filename suffix). Markup
data may be included in the search results of the query that located the
original document, or may be found by a separate query to the same or
another search engine. Markup data may be found using the original
captured text and other capture information or contextual information, or
it may be found using already-deduced information about the document and
location of the capture. Markup data may be found in a location specified
in the document, even if the markup itself is not included in the
document.

[0121]The markup may be largely static and specific to the document,
similar to the way links on a traditional html web page are often
embedded as static data within the html document, but markup may also be
dynamically generated and/or applied to a large number of documents. An
example of dynamic markup is information attached to a document that
includes the up-to-date share price of companies mentioned in that
document. An example of broadly applied markup is translation information
that is automatically available on multiple documents or sections of
documents in a particular language.

[0122]5.1.2. Personal "Plug-In" Layers

[0123]Users may also install, or subscribe to particular sources of,
markup data, thus personalizing the system's response to particular
captures.

[0124]5.2. Keywords and Phrases, Trademarks and Logos

[0125]Some elements in documents may have particular "markup" or
functionality associated with them based on their own characteristics
rather than their location in a particular document. Examples include
special marks that are printed in the document purely for the purpose of
being scanned, as well as logos and trademarks that can link the user to
further information about the organization concerned. The same applies to
"keywords" or "key phrases" in the text. Organizations might register
particular phrases with which they are associated, or with which they
would like to be associated, and attach certain markup to them that would
be available wherever that phrase was scanned.

[0126]Any word, phrase, etc. may have associated markup. For example, the
system may add certain items to a pop-up menu (e.g., a link to an online
bookstore) whenever the user captures the word "book," or the title of a
book, or a topic related to books. In some embodiments, of the system,
digital counterpart documents or indices are consulted to determine
whether a capture occurred near the word "book," or the title of a book,
or a topic related to books--and the system behavior is modified in
accordance with this proximity to keyword elements. In the preceding
example, note that markup enables data captured from non-commercial text
or documents to trigger a commercial transaction.

[0127]5.3. User-Supplied Content

[0128]5.3.1. User Comments and Annotations, Including Multimedia

[0129]Annotations are another type of electronic information that may be
associated with a document. For example, a user can attach an audio file
of his/her thoughts about a particular document for later retrieval as
voice annotations. As another example of a multimedia annotation, a user
may attach photographs of places referred to in the document. The user
generally supplies annotations for the document but the system can
associate annotations from other sources (for example, other users in a
work group may share annotations).

[0130]5.3.2. Notes from Proof-Reading

[0131]An important example of user-sourced markup is the annotation of
paper documents as part of a proofreading, editing or reviewing process.

[0132]5.4. Third-Party Content

[0133]As mentioned earlier, markup data may often be supplied by third
parties, such as by other readers of the document. Online discussions and
reviews are a good example, as are community-managed information relating
to particular works, volunteer-contributed translations and explanations.

[0134]Another example of third-party markup is that provided by
advertisers.

[0135]5.5. Dynamic Markup Based on Other Users' Data Streams

[0136]By analyzing the data captured from documents by several or all
users of the system, markup can be generated based on the activities and
interests of a community. An example might be an online bookstore that
creates markup or annotations that tell the user, in effect, "People who
enjoyed this book also enjoyed . . . " The markup may be less anonymous,
and may tell the user which of the people in his/her contact list have
also read this document recently. Other examples of datastream analysis
are included in Section 14.

[0137]5.6. Markup Based on External Events and Data Sources

[0138]Markup will often be based on external events and data sources, such
as input from a corporate database, information from the public Internet,
or statistics gathered by the local operating system.

[0139]Data sources may also be more local, and in particular may provide
information about the user's context--his/her identity, location and
activities. For example, the system might communicate with the user's
mobile phone and offer a markup layer that gives the user the option to
send a document to somebody that the user has recently spoken to on the
phone.

6. Authentication, Personalization and Security

[0140]In many situations, the identity of the user will be known.
Sometimes this will be an "anonymous identity," where the user is
identified only by the serial number of the capture device, for example.
Typically, however, it is expected that the system will have a much more
detailed knowledge of the user, which can be used for personalizing the
system and to allow activities and transactions to be performed in the
user's name.

[0141]6.1. User History and "Life Library"

[0142]One of the simplest and yet most useful functions that the system
can perform is to keep a record for a user of the text that s/he has
captured and any further information related to that capture, including
the details of any documents found, the location within that document and
any actions taken as a result.

[0143]This stored history is beneficial for both the user and the system.

[0144]6.1.1. For the User

[0145]The user can be presented with a "Life Library," a record of
everything s/he has read and captured. This may be simply for personal
interest, but may be used, for example, in a library by an academic who
is gathering material for the bibliography of his next paper.

[0146]In some circumstances, the user may wish to make the library public,
such as by publishing it on the web in a similar manner to a weblog, so
that others may see what s/he is reading and finds of interest.

[0147]Lastly, in situations where the user captures some text and the
system cannot immediately act upon the capture (for example, because an
electronic version of the document is not yet available) the capture can
be stored in the library and can be processed later, either automatically
or in response to a user request. A user can also subscribe to new markup
services and apply them to previously captured scans.

[0148]6.1.2. For the System

[0149]A record of a user's past captures is also useful for the system.
Many aspects of the system operation can be enhanced by knowing the
user's reading habits and history. The simplest example is that any scan
made by a user is more likely to come from a document that the user has
scanned in the recent past, and in particular if the previous scan was
within the last few minutes it is very likely to be from the same
document. Similarly, it is more likely that a document is being read in
start-to-finish order. Thus, for English documents, it is also more
likely that later scans will occur farther down in the document. Such
factors can help the system establish the location of the capture in
cases of ambiguity, and can also reduce the amount of text that needs to
be captured.

[0150]6.2. Scanner as Payment, Identity and Authentication Device

[0151]Because the capture process generally begins with a device of some
sort, typically an optical scanner or voice recorder, this device may be
used as a key that identifies the user and authorizes certain actions.

[0152]6.2.1. Associate Scanner with Phone or Other Account

[0153]The device may be embedded in a mobile phone or in some other way
associated with a mobile phone account. For example, a scanner may be
associated with a mobile phone account by inserting a SIM card associated
with the account into the scanner. Similarly, the device may be embedded
in a credit card or other payment card, or have the facility for such a
card to be connected to it. The device may therefore be used as a payment
token, and financial transactions may be initiated by the capture from
the rendered document.

[0154]6.2.2. Using Scanner Input for Authentication

[0155]The scanner may also be associated with a particular user or account
through the process of scanning some token, symbol or text associated
with that user or account. In addition, scanner may be used for biometric
identification, for example by scanning the fingerprint of the user. In
the case of an audio-based capture device, the system may identify the
user by matching the voice pattern of the user or by requiring the user
to speak a certain password or phrase.

[0156]For example, where a user scans a quote from a book and is offered
the option to buy the book from an online retailer, the user can select
this option, and is then prompted to scan his/her fingerprint to confirm
the transaction.

[0157]See also Sections 15.5 and 15.6.

[0158]6.2.3. Secure Scanning Device

[0159]When the capture device is used to identify and authenticate the
user, and to initiate transactions on behalf of the user, it is important
that communications between the device and other parts of the system are
secure. It is also important to guard against such situations as another
device impersonating a scanner, and so-called "man in the middle" attacks
where communications between the device and other components are
intercepted.

[0160]Techniques for providing such security are well understood in the
art; in various embodiments, the hardware and software in the device and
elsewhere in the system are configured to implement such techniques.

7. Publishing Models and Elements

[0161]An advantage of the described system is that there is no need to
alter the traditional processes of creating, printing or publishing
documents in order to gain many of the system's benefits. There are
reasons, though, that the creators or publishers of a document--hereafter
simply referred to as the "publishers"--may wish to create functionality
to support the described system.

[0162]This section is primarily concerned with the published documents
themselves. For information about other related commercial transactions,
such as advertising, see Section 10 entitled "P-Commerce."

[0163]7.1. Electronic Companions to Printed Documents

[0164]The system allows for printed documents to have an associated
electronic presence. Conventionally publishers often ship a CD-ROM with a
book that contains further digital information, tutorial movies and other
multimedia data, sample code or documents, or further reference
materials. In addition, some publishers maintain web sites associated
with particular publications which provide such materials, as well as
information which may be updated after the time of publishing, such as
errata, further comments, updated reference materials, bibliographies and
further sources of relevant data, and translations into other languages.
Online forums allow readers to contribute their comments about the
publication.

[0165]The described system allows such materials to be much more closely
tied to the rendered document than ever before, and allows the discovery
of and interaction with them to be much easier for the user. By capturing
a portion of text from the document, the system can automatically connect
the user to digital materials associated with the document, and more
particularly associated with that specific part of the document.
Similarly, the user can be connected to online communities that discuss
that section of the text, or to annotations and commentaries by other
readers. In the past, such information would typically need to be found
by searching for a particular page number or chapter.

[0166]An example application of this is in the area of academic textbooks
(Section 17.5).

[0167]7.2. "Subscriptions" to Printed Documents

[0168]Some publishers may have mailing lists to which readers can
subscribe if they wish to be notified of new relevant matter or when a
new edition of the book is published. With the described system, the user
can register an interest in particular documents or parts of documents
more easily, in some cases even before the publisher has considered
providing any such functionality. The reader's interest can be fed to the
publisher, possibly affecting their decision about when and where to
provide updates, further information, new editions or even completely new
publications on topics that have proved to be of interest in existing
books.

[0169]7.3. Printed Marks with Special Meaning or Containing Special Data

[0170]Many aspects of the system are enabled simply through the use of the
text already existing in a document. If the document is produced in the
knowledge that it may be used in conjunction with the system, however,
extra functionality can be added by printing extra information in the
form of special marks, which may be used to identify the text or a
required action more closely, or otherwise enhance the document's
interaction with the system. The simplest and most important example is
an indication to the reader that the document is definitely accessible
through the system. A special icon might be used, for example, to
indicate that this document has an online discussion forum associated
with it.

[0171]Such symbols may be intended purely for the reader, or they may be
recognized by the system when scanned and used to initiate some action.
Sufficient data may be encoded in the symbol to identify more than just
the symbol: it may also store information, for example about the
document, edition, and location of the symbol, which could be recognized
and read by the system.

[0172]7.4. Authorization Through Possession of the Paper Document

[0173]There are some situations where possession of or access to the
printed document would entitle the user to certain privileges, for
example, the access to an electronic copy of the document or to
additional materials. With the described system, such privileges could be
granted simply as a result of the user capturing portions of text from
the document, or scanning specially printed symbols. In cases where the
system needed to ensure that the user was in possession of the entire
document, it might prompt the user to scan particular items or phrases
from particular pages, e.g. "the second line of page 46."

[0174]7.5. Documents which Expire

[0175]If the printed document is a gateway to extra materials and
functionality, access to such features can also be time-limited. After
the expiry date, a user may be required to pay a fee or obtain a newer
version of the document to access the features again. The paper document
will, of course, still be usable, but will lose some of its enhanced
electronic functionality. This may be desirable, for example, because
there is profit for the publisher in receiving fees for access to
electronic materials, or in requiring the user to purchase new editions
from time to time, or because there are disadvantages associated with
outdated versions of the printed document remaining in circulation.
Coupons are an example of a type of commercial document that can have an
expiration date.

[0176]7.6. Popularity Analysis and Publishing Decisions

[0177]Section 10.5 discusses the use of the system's statistics to
influence compensation of authors and pricing of advertisements.

[0178]In some embodiments, the system deduces the popularity of a
publication from the activity in the electronic community associated with
it as well as from the use of the paper document. These factors may help
publishers to make decisions about what they will publish in future. If a
chapter in an existing book, for example, turns out to be exceedingly
popular, it may be worth expanding into a separate publication.

8. Document Access Services

[0179]An important aspect of the described system is the ability to
provide to a user who has access to a rendered copy of a document access
to an electronic version of that document. In some cases, a document is
freely available on a public network or a private network to which the
user has access. The system uses the captured text to identify, locate
and retrieve the document, in some cases displaying it on the user's
screen or depositing it in their email inbox.

[0180]In some cases, a document will be available in electronic form, but
for a variety of reasons may not be accessible to the user. There may not
be sufficient connectivity to retrieve the document, the user may not be
entitled to retrieve it, there may be a cost associated with gaining
access to it, or the document may have been withdrawn and possibly
replaced by a new version, to name just a few possibilities. The system
typically provides feedback to the user about these situations.

[0181]As mentioned in Section 7.4, the degree or nature of the access
granted to a particular user may be different if it is known that the
user already has access to a printed copy of the document.

[0182]8.1. Authenticated Document Access

[0183]Access to the document may be restricted to specific users, or to
those meeting particular criteria, or may only be available in certain
circumstances, for example when the user is connected to a secure
network. Section 6 describes some of the ways in which the credentials of
a user and scanner may be established.

[0184]8.2. Document Purchase--Copyright-Owner Compensation

[0185]Documents that are not freely available to the general public may
still be accessible on payment of a fee, often as compensation to the
publisher or copyright-holder. The system may implement payment
facilities directly or may make use of other payment methods associated
with the user, including those described in Section 6.2.

[0186]8.3. Document Escrow and Proactive Retrieval

[0187]Electronic documents are often transient; the digital source version
of a rendered document may be available now but inaccessible in future.
The system may retrieve and store the existing version on behalf of the
user, even if the user has not requested it, thus guaranteeing its
availability should the user request it in future. This also makes it
available for the system's use, for example for searching as part of the
process of identifying future captures.

[0188]In the event that payment is required for access to the document, a
trusted "document escrow" service can retrieve the document on behalf of
the user, such as upon payment of a modest fee, with the assurance that
the copyright holder will be fully compensated in future if the user
should ever request the document from the service.

[0189]Variations on this theme can be implemented if the document is not
available in electronic form at the time of capture. The user can
authorize the service to submit a request for or make a payment for the
document on his/her behalf if the electronic document should become
available at a later date.

[0190]8.4. Association with Other Subscriptions and Accounts

[0191]Sometimes payment may be waived, reduced or satisfied based on the
user's existing association with another account or subscription.
Subscribers to the printed version of a newspaper might automatically be
entitled to retrieve the electronic version, for example.

[0192]In other cases, the association may not be quite so direct: a user
may be granted access based on an account established by their employer,
or based on their scanning of a printed copy owned by a friend who is a
subscriber.

[0193]8.5. Replacing Photocopying with Scan-and-Print

[0194]The process of capturing text from a paper document, identifying an
electronic original, and printing that original, or some portion of that
original associated with the capture, forms an alternative to traditional
photocopying with many advantages: [0195]the paper document need not be
in the same location as the final printout, and in any case need not be
there at the same time [0196]the wear and damage caused to documents by
the photocopying process, especially to old, fragile and valuable
documents, can be avoided [0197]the quality of the copy is typically be
much higher [0198]records may be kept about which documents or portions
of documents are the most frequently copied [0199]payment may be made to
the copyright owner as part of the process [0200]unauthorized copying may
be prohibited

[0201]8.6. Locating Valuable Originals from Photocopies

[0202]When documents are particularly valuable, as in the case of legal
instruments or documents that have historical or other particular
significance, people may typically work from copies of those documents,
often for many years, while the originals are kept in a safe location.

[0203]The described system could be coupled to a database which records
the location of an original document, for example in an archiving
warehouse, making it easy for somebody with access to a copy to locate
the archived original paper document.

9. Text Recognition Technologies

[0204]Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies have traditionally
focused on images that include a large amount of text, for example from a
flat-bed scanner capturing a whole page. OCR technologies often need
substantial training and correcting by the user to produce useful text.
OCR technologies often require substantial processing power on the
machine doing the OCR, and, while many systems use a dictionary, they are
generally expected to operate on an effectively infinite vocabulary.

[0205]All of the above traditional characteristics may be improved upon in
the described system.

[0206]While this section focuses on OCR, many of the issues discussed map
directly onto other recognition technologies, in particular speech
recognition. As mentioned in Section 3.1, the process of capturing from
paper may be achieved by a user reading the text aloud into a device
which captures audio. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that
principles discussed here with respect to images, fonts, and text
fragments often also apply to audio samples, user speech models and
phonemes.

[0207]9.1. Optimization for Appropriate Devices

[0208]A scanning device for use with the described system will often be
small, portable, and low power. The scanning device may capture only a
few words at a time, and in some implementations does not even capture a
whole character at once, but rather a horizontal slice through the text,
many such slices being stitched together to form a recognizable signal
from which the text may be deduced. The scanning device may also have
very limited processing power or storage so, while in some embodiments it
may perform all of the OCR process itself, many embodiments will depend
on a connection to a more powerful device, possibly at a later time, to
convert the captured signals into text. Lastly, it may have very limited
facilities for user interaction, so may need to defer any requests for
user input until later, or operate in a "best-guess" mode to a greater
degree than is common now.

[0209]9.2. "Uncertain" OCR

[0210]The primary new characteristic of OCR within the described system is
the fact that it will, in general, examine images of text which exists
elsewhere and which may be retrieved in digital form. An exact
transcription of the text is therefore not always required from the OCR
engine. The OCR system may output a set or a matrix of possible matches,
in some cases including probability weightings, which can still be used
to search for the digital original.

[0211]9.3. Iterative OCR--Guess, Disambiguate, Guess . . .

[0212]If the device performing the recognition is able to contact the
document index at the time of processing, then the OCR process can be
informed by the contents of the document corpus as it progresses,
potentially offering substantially greater recognition accuracy.

[0213]Such a connection will also allow the device to inform the user when
sufficient text has been captured to identify the digital source.

[0214]9.4. Using Knowledge of Likely Rendering

[0215]When the system has knowledge of aspects of the likely printed
rendering of a document--such as the font typeface used in printing, or
the layout of the page, or which sections are in italics--this too can
help in the recognition process. (Section 4.1.1)

[0216]9.5. Font Caching--Determine Font on Host, Download to Client

[0217]As candidate source texts in the document corpus are identified, the
font, or a rendering of it, may be downloaded to the device to help with
the recognition.

[0218]9.6. Autocorrelation and Character Offsets

[0219]While component characters of a text fragment may be the most
recognized way to represent a fragment of text that may be used as a
document signature, other representations of the text may work
sufficiently well that the actual text of a text fragment need not be
used when attempting to locate the text fragment in a digital document
and/or database, or when disambiguating the representation of a text
fragment into a readable form. Other representations of text fragments
may provide benefits that actual text representations lack. For example,
optical character recognition of text fragments is often prone to errors,
unlike other representations of captured text fragments that may be used
to search for and/or recreate a text fragment without resorting to
optical character recognition for the entire fragment. Such methods may
be more appropriate for some devices used with the current system.

[0220]Those of ordinary skill in the art and others will appreciate that
there are many ways of describing the appearance of text fragments. Such
characterizations of text fragments may include, but are not limited to,
word lengths, relative word lengths, character heights, character widths,
character shapes, character frequencies, token frequencies, and the like.
In some embodiments, the offsets between matching text tokens (i.e., the
number of intervening tokens plus one) are used to characterize fragments
of text.

[0221]Conventional OCR uses knowledge about fonts, letter structure and
shape to attempt to determine characters in scanned text. Embodiments of
the present invention are different; they employ a variety of methods
that use the rendered text itself to assist in the recognition process.
These embodiments use characters (or tokens) to "recognize each other."
One way to refer to such self-recognition is "template matching," and is
similar to "convolution." To perform such self-recognition, the system
slides a copy of the text horizontally over itself and notes matching
regions of the text images. Prior template matching and convolution
techniques encompass a variety of related techniques. These techniques to
tokenize and/or recognize characters/tokens will be collectively referred
to herein as "autocorrelation," as the text is used to correlate with its
own component parts when matching characters/tokens.

[0222]When autocorrelating, complete connected regions that match are of
interest. This occurs when characters (or groups of characters) overlay
other instances of the same character (or group). Complete connected
regions that match automatically provide tokenizing of the text into
component tokens. As the two copies of the text are slid past each other,
the regions where perfect matching occurs (i.e., all pixels in a vertical
slice are matched) are noted. When a character/token matches itself, the
horizontal extent of this matching (e.g., the connected matching portion
of the text) also matches.

[0223]Note that at this stage there is no need to determine the actual
identity of each token (i.e., the particular letter, digit or symbol, or
group of these, that corresponds to the token image), only the offset to
the next occurrence of the same token in the scanned text. The offset
number is the distance (number of tokens) to the next occurrence of the
same token. If the token is unique within the text string, the offset is
zero (0). The sequence of token offsets thus generated is a signature
that can be used to identify the scanned text.

[0224]In some embodiments, the token offsets determined for a string of
scanned tokens are compared to an index that indexes a corpus of
electronic documents based upon the token offsets of their contents
(Section 4.1.2). In other embodiments, the token offsets determined for a
string of scanned tokens are converted to text, and compared to a more
conventional index that indexes a corpus of electronic documents based
upon their contents

[0225]As has been noted earlier, a similar token-correlation process may
be applied to speech fragments when the capture process consists of audio
samples of spoken words.

[0226]9.7. Font/Character "Self-Recognition"

[0227]Conventional template-matching OCR compares scanned images to a
library of character images. In essence, the alphabet is stored for each
font and newly scanned images are compared to the stored images to find
matching characters. The process generally has an initial delay until the
correct font has been identified. After that, the OCR process is
relatively quick because most documents use the same font throughout.
Subsequent images can therefore be converted to text by comparison with
the most recently identified font library.

[0228]The shapes of characters in most commonly used fonts are related.
For example, in most fonts, the letter "c" and the letter "e" are
visually related--as are "t" and "f," etc. The OCR process is enhanced by
use of this relationship to construct templates for letters that have not
been scanned yet. For example, where a reader scans a short string of
text from a paper document in a previously unencountered font such that
the system does not have a set of image templates with which to compare
the scanned images the system can leverage the probable relationship
between certain characters to construct the font template library even
though it has not yet encountered all of the letters in the alphabet. The
system can then use the constructed font template library to recognize
subsequent scanned text and to further refine the constructed font
library.

[0229]9.8. Send Anything Unrecognized (Including Graphics) to Server

[0230]When images cannot be machine-transcribed into a form suitable for
use in a search process, the images themselves can be saved for later use
by the user, for possible manual transcription, or for processing at a
later date when different resources may be available to the system.

10. P-Commerce

[0231]Many of the actions made possible by the system result in some
commercial transaction taking place. The phrase p-commerce is used herein
to describe commercial activities initiated from paper via the system.

[0232]10.1. Sales of Documents from their Physical Printed Copies.

[0233]When a user captures text from a document, the user may be offered
that document for purchase either in paper or electronic form. The user
may also be offered related documents, such as those quoted or otherwise
referred to in the paper document, or those on a similar subject, or
those by the same author.

[0234]10.2. Sales of Anything Else Initiated or Aided by Paper

[0235]The capture of text may be linked to other commercial activities in
a variety of ways. The captured text may be in a catalog that is
explicitly designed to sell items, in which case the text will be
associated fairly directly with the purchase of an item (Section 18.2).
The text may also be part of an advertisement, in which case a sale of
the item being advertised may ensue.

[0236]In other cases, the user captures other text from which their
potential interest in a commercial transaction may be deduced. A reader
of a novel set in a particular country, for example, might be interested
in a holiday there. Someone reading a review of a new car might be
considering purchasing it. The user may capture a particular fragment of
text knowing that some commercial opportunity will be presented to them
as a result, or it may be a side-effect of their capture activities.

[0237]10.3. Capture of Labels, Icons, Serial Numbers, Barcodes on an Item
Resulting in a Sale

[0238]Sometimes text or symbols are actually printed on an item or its
packaging. An example is the serial number or product id often found on a
label on the back or underside of a piece of electronic equipment. The
system can offer the user a convenient way to purchase one or more of the
same items by capturing that text. They may also be offered manuals,
support or repair services.

[0239]10.4. Contextual Advertisements

[0240]In addition to the direct capture of text from an advertisement, the
system allows for a new kind of advertising which is not necessarily
explicitly in the rendered document, but is nonetheless based on what
people are reading.

[0241]10.4.1. Advertising Based on Scan Context and History

[0242]In a traditional paper publication, advertisements generally consume
a large amount of space relative to the text of a newspaper article, and
a limited number of them can be placed around a particular article. In
the described system, advertising can be associated with individual words
or phrases, and can selected according to the particular interest the
user has shown by capturing that text and possibly taking into account
their history of past scans.

[0243]With the described system, it is possible for a purchase to be tied
to a particular printed document and for an advertiser to get
significantly more feedback about the effectiveness of their advertising
in particular print publications.

[0244]10.4.2. Advertising Based on User Context and History

[0245]The system may gather a large amount of information about other
aspects of a user's context for its own use (Section 13); estimates of
the geographical location of the user are a good example. Such data can
also be used to tailor the advertising presented to a user of the system.

[0246]10.5. Models of Compensation

[0247]The system enables some new models of compensation for advertisers
and marketers. The publisher of a printed document containing
advertisements may receive some income from a purchase that originated
from their document. This may be true whether or not the advertisement
existed in the original printed form; it may have been added
electronically either by the publisher, the advertiser or some third
party, and the sources of such advertising may have been subscribed to by
the user.

[0248]10.5.1. Popularity-Based Compensation

[0249]Analysis of the statistics generated by the system can reveal the
popularity of certain parts of a publication (Section 14.2). In a
newspaper, for example, it might reveal the amount of time readers spend
looking at a particular page or article, or the popularity of a
particular columnist. In some circumstances, it may be appropriate for an
author or publisher to receive compensation based on the activities of
the readers rather than on more traditional metrics such as words written
or number of copies distributed. An author whose work becomes a
frequently read authority on a subject might be considered differently in
future contracts from one whose books have sold the same number of copies
but are rarely opened. (See also Section 7.6)

[0250]10.5.2. Popularity-Based Advertising

[0251]Decisions about advertising in a document may also be based on
statistics about the readership. The advertising space around the most
popular columnists may be sold at a premium rate. Advertisers might even
be charged or compensated some time after the document is published based
on knowledge about how it was received.

[0252]10.6. Marketing Based on Life Library

[0253]The "Life Library" or scan history described in Sections 6.1 and
16.1 can be an extremely valuable source of information about the
interests and habits of a user. Subject to the appropriate consent and
privacy issues, such data can inform offers of goods or services to the
user. Even in an anonymous form, the statistics gathered can be
exceedingly useful.

[0254]10.7. Sale/Information at Later Date (when Available)

[0255]Advertising and other opportunities for commercial transactions may
not be presented to the user immediately at the time of text capture. For
example, the opportunity to purchase a sequel to a novel may not be
available at the time the user is reading the novel, but the system may
present them with that opportunity when the sequel is published.

[0256]A user may capture data that relates to a purchase or other
commercial transaction, but may choose not to initiate and/or complete
the transaction at the time the capture is made. In some embodiments,
data related to captures is stored in a user's Life Library, and these
Life Library entries can remain "active" (i.e., capable of subsequent
interactions similar to those available at the time the capture was
made). Thus a user may review a capture at some later time, and
optionally complete a transaction based on that capture. Because the
system can keep track of when and where the original capture occurred,
all parties involved in the transaction can be properly compensated. For
example, the author who wrote the story--and the publisher who published
the story--that appeared next to the advertisement from which the user
captured data can be compensated when, six months later, the user visits
their Life Library, selects that particular capture from the history, and
chooses "Purchase this item at Amazon" from the pop-up menu (which can be
similar or identical to the menu optionally presented at the time of the
capture).

11. Operating System and Application Integration

[0257]Modern Operating Systems (OSs) and other software packages have many
characteristics that can be advantageously exploited for use with the
described system, and may also be modified in various ways to provide an
even better platform for its use.

[0258]11.1. Incorporation of Scan and Print-Related Information in
Metadata and Indexing

[0259]New and upcoming file systems and their associated databases often
have the ability to store a variety of metadata associated with each
file. Traditionally, this metadata has included such things as the ID of
the user who created the file, the dates of creation, last modification,
and last use. Newer file systems allow such extra information as
keywords, image characteristics, document sources and user comments to be
stored, and in some systems this metadata can be arbitrarily extended.
File systems can therefore be used to store information that would be
useful in implementing the current system. For example, the date when a
given document was last printed can be stored by the file system, as can
details about which text from it has been captured from paper using the
described system, and when and by whom.

[0260]Operating systems are also starting to incorporate search engine
facilities that allow users to find local files more easily. These
facilities can be advantageously used by the system. It means that many
of the search-related concepts discussed in Sections 3 and 4 apply not
just to today's Internet-based and similar search engines, but also to
every personal computer.

[0261]In some cases specific software applications will also include
support for the system above and beyond the facilities provided by the
OS.

[0262]11.2. OS Support for Capture Devices

[0263]As the use of capture devices such as pen scanners becomes
increasingly common, it will become desirable to build support for them
into the operating system, in much the same way as support is provided
for mice and printers, since the applicability of capture devices extends
beyond a single software application. The same will be true for other
aspects of the system's operation. Some examples are discussed below. In
some embodiments, the entire described system, or the core of it, is
provided by the OS. In some embodiments, support for the system is
provided by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that can be used by
other software packages, including those directly implementing aspects of
the system.

[0264]11.2.1. Support for OCR and Other Recognition Technologies

[0265]Most of the methods of capturing text from a rendered document
require some recognition software to interpret the source data, typically
a scanned image or some spoken words, as text suitable for use in the
system. Some OSs include support for speech or handwriting recognition,
though it is less common for OSs to include support for OCR, since in the
past the use of OCR has typically been limited to a small range of
applications.

[0266]As recognition components become part of the OS, they can take
better advantage of other facilities provided by the OS. Many systems
include spelling dictionaries, grammar analysis tools,
internationalization and localization facilities, for example, all of
which can be advantageously employed by the described system for its
recognition process, especially since they may have been customized for
the particular user to include words and phrases that he/she would
commonly encounter.

[0267]If the operating system includes full-text indexing facilities, then
these can also be used to inform the recognition process, as described in
Section 9.3.

[0268]11.2.2. Action to be Taken on Scans

[0269]If an optical scan or other capture occurs and is presented to the
OS, it may have a default action to be taken under those circumstances in
the event that no other subsystem claims ownership of the capture. An
example of a default action is presenting the user with a choice of
alternatives, or submitting the captured text to the OS's built-in search
facilities.

[0271]If the digital source of the rendered document is found, the OS may
have a standard action that it will take when that particular document,
or a document of that class, is scanned. Applications and other
subsystems may register with the OS as potential handlers of particular
types of capture, in a similar manner to the announcement by applications
of their ability to handle certain file types.

[0272]Markup data associated with a rendered document, or with a capture
from a document, can include instructions to the operating system to
launch specific applications, pass applications arguments, parameters, or
data, etc.

[0273]11.2.4. Interpretation of Gestures and Mapping into Standard Actions

[0274]In Section 12.1.3 the use of "gestures" is discussed, particularly
in the case of optical scanning, where particular movements made with a
handheld scanner might represent standard actions such as marking the
start and end of a region of text.

[0275]This is analogous to actions such as pressing the shift key on a
keyboard while using the cursor keys to select a region of text, or using
the wheel on a mouse to scroll a document. Such actions by the user are
sufficiently standard that they are interpreted in a system-wide way by
the OS, thus ensuring consistent behavior. The same is desirable for
scanner gestures and other scanner-related actions.

[0277]In a similar way, certain items of text or other symbols may, when
scanned, cause standard actions to occur, and the OS may provide a
selection of these. An example might be that scanning the text "[print]"
in any document would cause the OS to retrieve and print a copy of that
document. The OS may also provide a way to register such actions and
associate them with particular scans.

[0278]11.3. Support in System GUI Components for Typical Scan-Initiated
activities

[0279]Most software applications are based substantially on standard
Graphical User Interface components provided by the OS.

[0280]Use of these components by developers helps to ensure consistent
behavior across multiple packages, for example that pressing the
left-cursor key in any text-editing context should move the cursor to the
left, without every programmer having to implement the same functionality
independently.

[0281]A similar consistency in these components is desirable when the
activities are initiated by text-capture or other aspects of the
described system. Some examples are given below.

[0282]11.3.1. Interface to Find Particular Text Content

[0283]A typical use of the system may be for the user to scan an area of a
paper document, and for the system to open the electronic counterpart in
a software package that is able to display or edit it, and cause that
package to scroll to and highlight the scanned text (Section 12.2.1). The
first part of this process, finding and opening the electronic document,
is typically provided by the OS and is standard across software packages.
The second part, however--locating a particular piece of text within a
document and causing the package to scroll to it and highlight it--is not
yet standardized and is often implemented differently by each package.
The availability of a standard API for this functionality could greatly
enhance the operation of this aspect of the system.

[0284]11.3.2. Text Interactions

[0285]Once a piece of text has been located within a document, the system
may wish to perform a variety of operations upon that text. As an
example, the system may request the surrounding text, so that the user's
capture of a few words could result in the system accessing the entire
sentence or paragraph containing them. Again, this functionality can be
usefully provided by the OS rather than being implemented in every piece
of software that handles text.

[0286]11.3.3. Contextual (Popup) Menus

[0287]Some of the operations that are enabled by the system will require
user feedback, and this may be optimally requested within the context of
the application handling the data. In some embodiments, the system uses
the application pop-up menus traditionally associated with clicking the
right mouse button on some text. The system inserts extra options into
such menus, and causes them to be displayed as a result of activities
such as scanning a paper document.

[0288]11.4. Web/Network Interfaces

[0289]In today's increasingly networked world, much of the functionality
available on individual machines can also be accessed over a network, and
the functionality associated with the described system is no exception.
As an example, in an office environment, many paper documents received by
a user may have been printed by other users' machines on the same
corporate network. The system on one computer, in response to a capture,
may be able to query those other machines for documents which may
correspond to that capture, subject to the appropriate permission
controls.

[0290]11.5. Printing of Document Causes Saving

[0291]An important factor in the integration of paper and digital
documents is maintaining as much information as possible about the
transitions between the two. In some embodiments, the OS keeps a simple
record of when any document was printed and by whom. In some embodiments,
the OS takes one or more further actions that would make it better suited
for use with the system. Examples include: [0292]Saving the digital
rendered version of every document printed along with information about
the source from which it was printed [0293]Saving a subset of useful
information about the printed version--for example, the fonts used and
where the line breaks occur--which might aid future scan interpretation
[0294]Saving the version of the source document associated with any
printed copy [0295]Indexing the document automatically at the time of
printing and storing the results for future searching

[0296]11.6. My (Printed/Scanned) Documents

[0297]An OS often maintains certain categories of folders or files that
have particular significance. A user's documents may, by convention or
design, be found in a "My Documents" folder, for example. Standard
file-opening dialogs may automatically include a list of recently opened
documents.

[0298]On an OS optimized for use with the described system, such
categories may be enhanced or augmented in ways that take into account a
user's interaction with paper versions of the stored files. Categories
such as "My Printed Documents" or "My Recently-Read Documents" might
usefully be identified and incorporated in its operations.

[0299]11.7. OS-Level Markup Hierarchies

[0300]Since important aspects of the system are typically provided using
the "markup" concepts discussed in Section 5, it would clearly be
advantageous to have support for such markup provided by the OS in a way
that was accessible to multiple applications as well as to the OS itself.
In addition, layers of markup may be provided by the OS, based on its own
knowledge of documents under its control and the facilities it is able to
provide.

11.8. Use of OS DRM Facilities

[0301]An increasing number of operating systems support some form of
"Digital Rights Management": the ability to control the use of particular
data according to the rights granted to a particular user, software
entity or machine. It may inhibit unauthorized copying or distribution of
a particular document, for example.

12. User Interface

[0302]The user interface of the system may be entirely on a PC, if the
capture device is relatively dumb and is connected to it by a cable, or
entirely on the device, if it is sophisticated and with significant
processing power of its own. In some cases, some functionality resides in
each component. Part, or indeed all, of the system's functionality may
also be implemented on other devices such as mobile phones or PDAs.

[0303]The descriptions in the following sections are therefore indications
of what may be desirable in certain implementations, but they are not
necessarily appropriate for all and may be modified in several ways.

[0304]12.1. On the Capture Device

[0305]With all capture devices, but particularly in the case of an optical
scanner, the user's attention will generally be on the device and the
paper at the time of scanning. It is very desirable, then, that any input
and feedback needed as part of the process of scanning do not require the
user's attention to be elsewhere, for example on the screen of a
computer, more than is necessary.

[0306]12.1.1. Feedback on Scanner

[0307]A handheld scanner may have a variety of ways of providing feedback
to the user about particular conditions. The most obvious types are
direct visual, where the scanner incorporates indicator lights or even a
full display, and auditory, where the scanner can make beeps, clicks or
other sounds. Important alternatives include tactile feedback, where the
scanner can vibrate, buzz, or otherwise stimulate the user's sense of
touch, and projected feedback, where it indicates a status by projecting
onto the paper anything from a colored spot of light to a sophisticated
display.

[0308]Important immediate feedback that may be provided on the device
includes: [0309]feedback on the scanning process--user scanning too
fast, at too great an angle, or drifting too high or low on a particular
line [0310]sufficient content--enough has been scanned to be pretty
certain of finding a match if one exists--important for disconnected
operation [0311]context known--a source of the text has been located
[0312]unique context known--one unique source of the text has been
located [0313]availability of content--indication of whether the content
is freely available to the user, or at a cost

[0314]Many of the user interactions normally associated with the later
stages of the system may also take place on the capture device if it has
sufficient abilities, for example, to display part or all of a document.

[0315]12.1.2. Controls on Scanner

[0316]The device may provide a variety of ways for the user to provide
input in addition to basic text capture. Even when the device is in close
association with a host machine that has input options such as keyboards
and mice, it can be disruptive for the user to switch back and forth
between manipulating the scanner and using a mouse, for example.

[0317]The handheld scanner may have buttons, scroll/jog-wheels,
touch-sensitive surfaces, and/or accelerometers for detecting the
movement of the device. Some of these allow a richer set of interactions
while still holding the scanner.

[0318]For example, in response to scanning some text, the system presents
the user with a set of several possible matching documents. The user uses
a scroll-wheel on the side of the scanner is to select one from the list,
and clicks a button to confirm the selection.

[0319]12.1.3. Gestures

[0320]The primary reason for moving a scanner across the paper is to
capture text, but some movements may be detected by the device and used
to indicate other user intentions. Such movements are referred to herein
as "gestures."

[0321]As an example, the user can indicate a large region of text by
scanning the first few words in conventional left-to-right order, and the
last few in reverse order, i.e. right to left. The user can also indicate
the vertical extent of the text of interest by moving the scanner down
the page over several lines. A backwards scan might indicate cancellation
of the previous scan operation.

[0322]12.1.4. Online/Offline Behavior

[0323]Many aspects of the system may depend on network connectivity,
either between components of the system such as a scanner and a host
laptop, or with the outside world in the form of a connection to
corporate databases and Internet search. This connectivity may not be
present all the time, however, and so there will be occasions when part
or all of the system may be considered to be "offline." It is desirable
to allow the system to continue to function usefully in those
circumstances.

[0324]The device may be used to capture text when it is out of contact
with other parts of the system. A very simple device may simply be able
to store the image or audio data associated with the capture, ideally
with a timestamp indicating when it was captured. The various captures
may be uploaded to the rest of the system when the device is next in
contact with it, and handled then. The device may also upload other data
associated with the captures, for example voice annotations associated
with optical scans, or location information.

[0325]More sophisticated devices may be able to perform some or all of the
system operations themselves despite being disconnected. Various
techniques for improving their ability to do so are discussed in Section
15.3. Often it will be the case that some, but not all, of the desired
actions can be performed while offline. For example, the text may be
recognized, but identification of the source may depend on a connection
to an Internet-based search engine. In some embodiments, the device
therefore stores sufficient information about how far each operation has
progressed for the rest of the system to proceed efficiently when
connectivity is restored.

[0326]The operation of the system will, in general, benefit from
immediately available connectivity, but there are some situations in
which performing several captures and then processing them as a batch can
have advantages. For example, as discussed in Section 13 below, the
identification of the source of a particular capture may be greatly
enhanced by examining other captures made by the user at approximately
the same time. In a fully connected system where live feedback is being
provided to the user, the system is only able to use past captures when
processing the current one. If the capture is one of a batch stored by
the device when offline, however, the system will be able to take into
account any data available from later captures as well as earlier ones
when doing its analysis.

[0327]12.2. On a Host Device

[0328]A scanner will often communicate with some other device, such as a
PC, PDA, phone or digital camera to perform many of the functions of the
system, including more detailed interactions with the user.

[0329]12.2.1. Activities Performed in Response to a Capture

[0330]When the host device receives a capture, it may initiate a variety
of activities. An incomplete list of possible activities performed by the
system after locating and electronic counterpart document associated with
the capture and a location within that document follows. [0331]The
details of the capture may be stored in the user's history. (Section 6.1)
[0332]The document may be retrieved from local storage or a remote
location. (Section 8) [0333]The operating system's metadata and other
records associated with the document may be updated. (Section 11.1)
[0334]Markup associated with the document may be examined to determine
the next relevant operations. (Section 5) [0335]A software application
may be started to edit, view or otherwise operate on the document. The
choice of application may depend on the source document, or on the
contents of the scan, or on some other aspect of the capture. (Section
11.2.2, 11.2.3) [0336]The application may scroll to, highlight, move the
insertion point to, or otherwise indicate the location of the capture.
(Section 11.3) [0337]The precise bounds of the captured text may be
modified, for example to select whole words, sentences or paragraphs
around the captured text. (Section 11.3.2) [0338]The user may be given
the option to copy the capture text to the clipboard or perform other
standard operating system or application-specific operations upon it.
[0339]Annotations may be associated with the document or the captured
text. These may come from immediate user input, or may have been captured
earlier, for example in the case of voice annotations associated with an
optical scan. (Section 19.4) [0340]Markup may be examined to determine a
set of further possible operations for the user to select.

[0341]12.2.2. Contextual Popup Menus

[0342]Sometimes the appropriate action to be taken by the system will be
obvious, but sometimes it will require a choice to be made by the user.
One good way to do this is through the use of "popup menus" or, in cases
where the content is also being displayed on a screen, with so-called
"contextual menus" that appear close to the content. (See Section
11.3.3). In some embodiments, the scanner device projects a popup menu
onto the paper document. A user may select from such menus using
traditional methods such as a keyboard and mouse, or by using controls on
the capture device (Section 12.1.2), gestures (Section 12.1.3), or by
interacting with the computer display using the scanner (Section 12.2.4).
In some embodiments, the popup menus which can appear as a result of a
capture include default items representing actions which occur if the
user does not respond--for example, if the user ignores the menu and
makes another capture.

[0343]12.2.3. Feedback on Disambiguation

[0344]When a user starts capturing text, there will initially be several
documents or other text locations that it could match. As more text is
captured, and other factors are taken into account (Section 13), the
number of candidate locations will decrease until the actual location is
identified, or further disambiguation is not possible without user input.
In some embodiments, the system provides a real-time display of the
documents or the locations found, for example in list, thumbnail-image or
text-segment form, and for the number of elements in that display to
reduce in number as capture continues. In some embodiments, the system
displays thumbnails of all candidate documents, where the size or
position of the thumbnail is dependent on the probability of it being the
correct match.

[0345]When a capture is unambiguously identified, this fact may be
emphasized to the user, for example using audio feedback.

[0346]Sometimes the text captured will occur in many documents and will be
recognized to be a quotation. The system may indicate this on the screen,
for example by grouping documents containing a quoted reference around
the original source document.

[0347]12.2.4. Scanning from Screen

[0348]Some optical scanners may be able to capture text displayed on a
screen as well as on paper. Accordingly, the term rendered document is
used herein to indicate that printing onto paper is not the only form of
rendering, and that the capture of text or symbols for use by the system
may be equally valuable when that text is displayed on an electronic
display.

[0349]The user of the described system may be required to interact with a
computer screen for a variety of other reasons, such as to select from a
list of options. It can be inconvenient for the user to put down the
scanner and start using the mouse or keyboard. Other sections have
described physical controls on the scanner (Section 12.1.2) or gestures
(Section 12.1.3) as methods of input which do not require this change of
tool, but using the scanner on the screen itself to scan some text or
symbol is an important alternative provided by the system.

[0350]In some embodiments, the optics of the scanner allow it to be used
in a similar manner to a light-pen, directly sensing its position on the
screen without the need for actual scanning of text, possibly with the
aid of special hardware or software on the computer.

13. Context Interpretation

[0351]An important aspect of the described system is the use of other
factors, beyond the simple capture of a string of text, to help identify
the document in use. A capture of a modest amount of text may often
identify the document uniquely, but in many situations it will identify a
few candidate documents. One solution is to prompt the user to confirm
the document being scanned, but a preferable alternative is to make use
of other factors to narrow down the possibilities automatically. Such
supplemental information can dramatically reduce the amount of text that
needs to be captured and/or increase the reliability and speed with which
the location in the electronic counterpart can be identified. This extra
material is referred to as "context," and it was discussed briefly in
Section 4.2.2. We now consider it in more depth.

[0352]13.1. System and Capture Context

[0353]Perhaps the most important example of such information is the user's
capture history.

[0354]It is highly probable that any given capture comes from the same
document as the previous one, or from an associated document, especially
if the previous capture took place in the last few minutes (Section
6.1.2). Conversely, if the system detects that the font has changed
between two scans, it is more likely that they are from different
documents.

[0355]Also useful are the user's longer-term capture history and reading
habits. These can also be used to develop a model of the user's interests
and associations.

[0356]13.2. User's Real-World Context

[0357]Another example of useful context is the user's geographical
location. A user in Paris is much more likely to be reading Le Monde than
the Seattle Times, for example. The timing, size and geographical
distribution of printed versions of the documents can therefore be
important, and can to some degree be deduced from the operation of the
system.

[0358]The time of day may also be relevant, for example in the case of a
user who always reads one type of publication on the way to work, and a
different one at lunchtime or on the train going home.

[0359]13.3. Related Digital Context

[0360]The user's recent use of electronic documents, including those
searched for or retrieved by more conventional means, can also be a
helpful indicator.

[0361]In some cases, such as on a corporate network, other factors may be
usefully considered: [0362]Which documents have been printed recently?
[0363]Which documents have been modified recently on the corporate file
server? [0364]Which documents have been emailed recently?

[0365]All of these examples might suggest that a user was more likely to
be reading a paper version of those documents. In contrast, if the
repository in which a document resides can affirm that the document has
never been printed or sent anywhere where it might have been printed,
then it can be safely eliminated in any searches originating from paper.

[0366]13.4. Other Statistics--the Global Context

[0367]Section 14 covers the analysis of the data stream resulting from
paper-based searches, but it should be noted here that statistics about
the popularity of documents with other readers, about the timing of that
popularity, and about the parts of documents most frequently scanned are
all examples of further factors which can be beneficial in the search
process. The system brings the possibility of Google-type page-ranking to
the world of paper.

[0368]See also Section 4.2.2 for some other implications of the use of
context for search engines.

14. Data-Stream Analysis

[0369]The use of the system generates an exceedingly valuable data-stream
as a side effect. This stream is a record of what users are reading and
when, and is in many cases a record of what they find particularly
valuable in the things they read. Such data has never really been
available before for paper documents.

[0370]Some ways in which this data can be useful for the system, and for
the user of the system, are described in Section 6.1. This section
concentrates on its use for others. There are, of course, substantial
privacy issues to be considered with any distribution of data about what
people are reading, but such issues as preserving the anonymity of data
are well known to those of skill in the art.

[0371]14.1. Document Tracking

[0372]When the system knows which documents any given user is reading, it
can also deduce who is reading any given document. This allows the
tracking of a document through an organization, to allow analysis, for
example, of who is reading it and when, how widely it was distributed,
how long that distribution took, and who has seen current versions while
others are still working from out-of-date copies.

[0373]For published documents that have a wider distribution, the tracking
of individual copies is more difficult, but the analysis of the
distribution of readership is still possible.

[0374]14.2. Read Ranking--Popularity of Documents and Sub-Regions

[0375]In situations where users are capturing text or other data that is
of particular interest to them, the system can deduce the popularity of
certain documents and of particular sub-regions of those documents. This
forms a valuable input to the system itself (Section 4.2.2) and an
important source of information for authors, publishers and advertisers
(Section 7.6, Section 10.5). This data is also useful when integrated in
search engines and search indices--for example, to assist in ranking
search results for queries coming from rendered documents, and/or to
assist in ranking conventional queries typed into a web browser.

[0376]14.3. Analysis of Users--Building Profiles

[0377]Knowledge of what a user is reading enables the system to create a
quite detailed model of the user's interests and activities. This can be
useful on an abstract statistical basis--"35% of users who buy this
newspaper also read the latest book by that author"--but it can also
allow other interactions with the individual user, as discussed below.

[0378]14.3.1. Social Networking

[0379]One example is connecting one user with others who have related
interests. These may be people already known to the user. The system may
ask a university professor, "Did you know that your colleague at XYZ
University has also just read this paper?" The system may ask a user, "Do
you want to be linked up with other people in your neighborhood who are
also how reading Jane Eyre?" Such links may be the basis for the
automatic formation of book clubs and similar social structures, either
in the physical world or online.

[0380]14.3.2. Marketing

[0381]Section 10.6 has already mentioned the idea of offering products and
services to an individual user based on their interactions with the
system. Current online booksellers, for example, often make
recommendations to a user based on their previous interactions with the
bookseller. Such recommendations become much more useful when they are
based on interactions with the actual books.

[0382]14.4. Marketing Based on Other Aspects of the Data-Stream

[0383]We have discussed some of the ways in which the system may influence
those publishing documents, those advertising through them, and other
sales initiated from paper (Section 10). Some commercial activities may
have no direct interaction with the paper documents at all and yet may be
influenced by them. For example, the knowledge that people in one
community spend more time reading the sports section of the newspaper
than they do the financial section might be of interest to somebody
setting up a health club.

[0384]14.5. Types of Data that May be Captured

[0385]In addition to the statistics discussed, such as who is reading
which bits of which documents, and when and where, it can be of interest
to examine the actual contents of the text captured, regardless of
whether or not the document has been located.

[0386]In many situations, the user will also not just be capturing some
text, but will be causing some action to occur as a result. It might be
emailing a reference to the document to an acquaintance, for example.
Even in the absence of information about the identity of the user or the
recipient of the email, the knowledge that somebody considered the
document worth emailing is very useful.

[0387]In addition to the various methods discussed for deducing the value
of a particular document or piece of text, in some circumstances the user
will explicitly indicate the value by assigning it a rating.

[0388]Lastly, when a particular set of users are known to form a group,
for example when they are known to be employees of a particular company,
the aggregated statistics of that group can be used to deduce the
importance of a particular document to that group.

15. Device Features and Functions

[0389]A capture device for use with the system needs little more than a
way of capturing text from a rendered version of the document. As
described earlier (Section 1.2), this capture may be achieved through a
variety of methods including taking a photograph of part of the document
or typing some words into a mobile phone keypad. This capture may be
achieved using a small hand-held optical scanner capable of recording a
line or two of text at a time, or an audio capture device such as a
voice-recorder into which the user is reading text from the document. The
device used may be a combination of these--an optical scanner which could
also record voice annotations, for example--and the capturing
functionality may be built into some other device such as a mobile phone,
PDA, digital camera or portable music player.

[0390]15.1. Input and Output

[0391]Many of the possibly beneficial additional input and output
facilities for such a device have been described in Section 12.1. They
include buttons, scroll-wheels and touch-pads for input, and displays,
indicator lights, audio and tactile transducers for output. Sometimes the
device will incorporate many of these, sometimes very few. Sometimes the
capture device will be able to communicate with another device that
already has them (Section 15.6), for example using a wireless link, and
sometimes the capture functionality will be incorporated into such other
device (Section 15.7).

15.2. Connectivity

[0392]In some embodiments, the device implements the majority of the
system itself. In some embodiments, however, it often communicates with a
PC or other computing device and with the wider world using
communications facilities.

[0393]Often these communications facilities are in the form of a
general-purpose data network such as Ethernet, 802.11 or UWB or a
standard peripheral-connecting network such as USB, IEEE-1394 (Firewire),
Bluetooth® or infra-red. When a wired connection such as Firewire or
USB is used, the device may receive electrical power though the same
connection. In some circumstances, the capture device may appear to a
connected machine to be a conventional peripheral such as a USB storage
device.

[0394]Lastly, the device may in some circumstances "dock" with another
device, either to be used in conjunction with that device or for
convenient storage.

[0395]15.3. Caching and Other Online/Offline Functionality

[0396]Sections 3.5 and 12.1.4 have raised the topic of disconnected
operation. When a capture device has a limited subset of the total
system's functionality, and is not in communication with the other parts
of the system, the device can still be useful, though the functionality
available will sometimes be reduced. At the simplest level, the device
can record the raw image or audio data being captured and this can be
processed later. For the user's benefit, however, it can be important to
give feedback where possible about whether the data captured is likely to
be sufficient for the task in hand, whether it can be recognized or is
likely to be recognizable, and whether the source of the data can be
identified or is likely to be identifiable later. The user will then know
whether their capturing activity is worthwhile. Even when all of the
above are unknown, the raw data can still be stored so that, at the very
least, the user can refer to them later. The user may be presented with
the image of a scan, for example, when the scan cannot be recognized by
the OCR process.

[0397]To illustrate some of the range of options available, both a rather
minimal optical scanning device and then a much more full-featured one
are described below. Many devices occupy a middle ground between the two.

[0398]15.3.1. The Simplescanner--a Low-End Offline Example

[0399]The SimpleScanner has a scanning head able to read pixels from the
page as it is moved along the length of a line of text. It can detect its
movement along the page and record the pixels with some information about
the movement. It also has a clock, which allows each scan to be
time-stamped. The clock is synchronized with a host device when the
SimpleScanner has connectivity. The clock may not represent the actual
time of day, but relative times may be determined from it so that the
host can deduce the actual time of a scan, or at worst the elapsed time
between scans.

[0400]The SimpleScanner does not have sufficient processing power to
perform any OCR itself, but it does have some basic knowledge about
typical word-lengths, word-spacings, and their relationship to font size.
It has some basic indicator lights which tell the user whether the scan
is likely to be readable, whether the head is being moved too fast, too
slowly or too inaccurately across the paper, and when it determines that
sufficient words of a given size are likely to have been scanned for the
document to be identified.

[0401]The SimpleScanner has a USB connector and can be plugged into the
USB port on a computer, where it will be recharged. To the computer it
appears to be a USB storage device on which time-stamped data files have
been recorded, and the rest of the system software takes over from this
point.

[0402]15.3.2. The Superscanner--a High-End Offline Example

[0403]The SuperScanner also depends on connectivity for its full
operation, but it has a significant amount of on-board storage and
processing which can help it make better judgments about the data
captured while offline.

[0404]As it moves along the line of text, the captured pixels are stitched
together and passed to an OCR engine that attempts to recognize the text.
A number of fonts, including those from the user's most-read
publications, have been downloaded to it to help perform this task, as
has a dictionary that is synchronized with the user's spelling-checker
dictionary on their PC and so contains many of the words they frequently
encounter. Also stored on the scanner is a list of words and phrases with
the typical frequency of their use--this may be combined with the
dictionary. The scanner can use the frequency statistics both to help
with the recognition process and also to inform its judgment about when a
sufficient quantity of text has been captured; more frequently used
phrases are less likely to be useful as the basis for a search query.

[0405]In addition, the full index for the articles in the recent issues of
the newspapers and periodicals most commonly read by the user are stored
on the device, as are the indices for the books the user has recently
purchased from an online bookseller, or from which the user has scanned
anything within the last few months. Lastly, the titles of several
thousand of the most popular publications which have data available for
the system are stored so that, in the absence of other information the
user can scan the title and have a good idea as to whether or not
captures from a particular work are likely to be retrievable in
electronic form later.

[0406]During the scanning process, the system informs user that the
captured data has been of sufficient quality and of a sufficient nature
to make it probable that the electronic copy can be retrieved when
connectivity is restored. Often the system indicates to the user that the
scan is known to have been successful and that the context has been
recognized in one of the on-board indices, or that the publication
concerned is known to be making its data available to the system, so the
later retrieval ought to be successful.

[0407]The SuperScanner docks in a cradle connected to a PC's Firewire or
USB port, at which point, in addition to the upload of captured data, its
various onboard indices and other databases are updated based on recent
user activity and new publications. It also has the facility to connect
to wireless public networks or to communicate via Bluetooth to a mobile
phone and thence with the public network when such facilities are
available.

[0408]15.4. Features for Optical Scanning

[0409]We now consider some of the features that may be particularly
desirable in an optical scanner device.

[0410]15.4.1. Flexible Positioning and Convenient Optics

[0411]One of the reasons for the continuing popularity of paper is the
ease of its use in a wide variety of situations where a computer, for
example, would be impractical or inconvenient. A device intended to
capture a substantial part of a user's interaction with paper should
therefore be similarly convenient in use. This has not been the case for
scanners in the past; even the smallest hand-held devices have been
somewhat unwieldy. Those designed to be in contact with the page have to
be held at a precise angle to the paper and moved very carefully along
the length of the text to be scanned. This is acceptable when scanning a
business report on an office desk, but may be impractical when scanning a
phrase from a novel while waiting for a train. Scanners based on
camera-type optics that operate at a distance from the paper may
similarly be useful in some circumstances.

[0412]Some embodiments of the system use a scanner that scans in contact
with the paper, and which, instead of lenses, uses an image conduit a
bundle of optical fibers to transmit the image from the page to the
optical sensor device. Such a device can be shaped to allow it to be held
in a natural position; for example, in some embodiments, the part in
contact with the page is wedge-shaped, allowing the user's hand to move
more naturally over the page in a movement similar to the use of a
highlighter pen. The conduit is either in direct contact with the paper
or in close proximity to it, and may have a replaceable transparent tip
that can protect the image conduit from possible damage. As has been
mentioned in Section 12.2.4, the scanner may be used to scan from a
screen as well as from paper, and the material of the tip can be chosen
to reduce the likelihood of damage to such displays.

[0413]Lastly, some embodiments of the device will provide feedback to the
user during the scanning process which will indicate through the use of
light, sound or tactile feedback when the user is scanning too fast, too
slow, too unevenly or is drifting too high or low on the scanned line.

[0415]As described in Section 6, the capture device may form an important
part of identification and authorization for secure transactions,
purchases, and a variety of other operations. It may therefore
incorporate, in addition to the circuitry and software required for such
a role, various hardware features that can make it more secure, such as a
smartcard reader, RFID, or a keypad on which to type a PIN.

[0416]It may also include various biometric sensors to help identify the
user. In the case of an optical scanner, for example, the scanning head
may also be able to read a fingerprint. For a voice recorder, the voice
pattern of the user may be used.

[0417]15.6. Device Associations

[0418]In some embodiments, the device is able to form an association with
other nearby devices to increase either its own or their functionality.
In some embodiments, for example, it uses the display of a nearby PC or
phone to give more detailed feedback about its operation, or uses their
network connectivity. The device may, on the other hand, operate in its
role as a security and identification device to authenticate operations
performed by the other device. Or it may simply form an association in
order to function as a peripheral to that device.

[0419]An interesting aspect of such associations is that they may be
initiated and authenticated using the capture facilities of the device.
For example, a user wishing to identify themselves securely to a public
computer terminal may use the scanning facilities of the device to scan a
code or symbol displayed on a particular area of the terminal's screen
and so effect a key transfer. An analogous process may be performed using
audio signals picked up by a voice-recording device.

[0420]15.7. Integration with Other Devices

[0421]In some embodiments, the functionality of the capture device is
integrated into some other device that is already in use. The integrated
devices may be able to share a power supply, data capture and storage
capabilities, and network interfaces. Such integration may be done simply
for convenience, to reduce cost, or to enable functionality that would
not otherwise be available.

[0422]Some examples of devices into which the capture functionality can be
integrated include: [0423]an existing peripheral such as a mouse, a
stylus, a USB "webcam" camera, a Bluetooth® headset or a remote
control [0424]another processing/storage device, such as a PDA, an MP3
player, a voice recorder, a digital camera or a mobile phone [0425]other
often-carried items, just for convenience--a watch, a piece of jewelry, a
pen, a car key fob

[0426]15.7.1. Mobile Phone Integration

[0427]As an example of the benefits of integration, we consider the use of
a modified mobile phone as the capture device.

[0428]In some embodiments, the phone hardware is not modified to support
the system, such as where the text capture can be adequately done through
voice recognition, where they can either be processed by the phone
itself, or handled by a system at the other end of a telephone call, or
stored in the phone's memory for future processing. Many modern phones
have the ability to download software that could implement some parts of
the system. Such voice capture is likely to be suboptimal in many
situations, however, for example when there is substantial background
noise, and accurate voice recognition is a difficult task at the best of
times. The audio facilities may best be used to capture voice
annotations.

[0429]In some embodiments, the camera built into many mobile phones is
used to capture an image of the text. The phone display, which would
normally act as a viewfinder for the camera, may overlay on the live
camera image information about the quality of the image and its
suitability for OCR, which segments of text are being captured, and even
a transcription of the text if the OCR can be performed on the phone.

[0430]In some embodiments, the phone is modified to add dedicated capture
facilities, or to provide such functionality in a clip-on adaptor or a
separate Bluetooth-connected peripheral in communication with the phone.
Whatever the nature of the capture mechanism, the integration with a
modern cellphone has many other advantages. The phone has connectivity
with the wider world, which means that queries can be submitted to remote
search engines or other parts of the system, and copies of documents may
be retrieved for immediate storage or viewing. A phone typically has
sufficient processing power for many of the functions of the system to be
performed locally, and sufficient storage to capture a reasonable amount
of data. The amount of storage can also often be expanded by the user.
Phones have reasonably good displays and audio facilities to provide user
feedback, and often a vibrate function for tactile feedback. They also
have good power supplies.

[0431]Most significantly of all, they are a device that most users are
already carrying.

[0432]Part III--Example Applications of the System

[0433]This section lists example uses of the system and applications that
may be built on it. This list is intended to be purely illustrative and
in no sense exhaustive.

16. Personal Applications

[0434]16.1. Life Library

[0435]The Life Library (see also Section 6.1.1) is a digital archive of
any important documents that the subscriber wishes to save and is a set
of embodiments of services of this system. Important books, magazine
articles, newspaper clippings, etc., can all be saved in digital form in
the Life Library. Additionally, the subscriber's annotations, comments,
and notes can be saved with the documents. The Life Library can be
accessed via the Internet and World Wide Web.

[0436]The system creates and manages the Life Library document archive for
subscribers. The subscriber indicates which documents the subscriber
wishes to have saved in his life library by scanning information from the
document or by otherwise indicating to the system that the particular
document is to be added to the subscriber's Life Library. The scanned
information is typically text from the document but can also be a barcode
or other code identifying the document. The system accepts the code and
uses it to identify the source document. After the document is identified
the system can store either a copy of the document in the user's Life
Library or a link to a source where the document may be obtained.

[0437]One embodiment of the Life Library system can check whether the
subscriber is authorized to obtain the electronic copy. For example, if a
reader scans text or an identifier from a copy of an article in the New
York Times (NYT) so that the article will be added to the reader's Life
Library, the Life Library system will verify with the NYT whether the
reader is subscribed to the online version of the NYT; if so, the reader
gets a copy of the article stored in his Life Library account; if not,
information identifying the document and how to order it is stored in his
Life Library account.

[0438]In some embodiments, the system maintains a subscriber profile for
each subscriber that includes access privilege information. Document
access information can be compiled in several ways, two of which are: 1)
the subscriber supplies the document access information to the Life
Library system, along with his account names and passwords, etc., or 2)
the Life Library service provider queries the publisher with the
subscriber's information and the publisher responds by providing access
to an electronic copy if the Life Library subscriber is authorized to
access the material. If the Life Library subscriber is not authorized to
have an electronic copy of the document, the publisher provides a price
to the Life Library service provider, which then provides the customer
with the option to purchase the electronic document. If so, the Life
Library service provider either pays the publisher directly and bills the
Life Library customer later or the Life Library service provider
immediately bills the customer's credit card for the purchase. The Life
Library service provider would get a percentage of the purchase price or
a small fixed fee for facilitating the transaction.

[0439]The system can archive the document in the subscriber's personal
library and/or any other library to which the subscriber has archival
privileges. For example, as a user scans text from a printed document,
the Life Library system can identify the rendered document and its
electronic counterpart. After the source document is identified, the Life
Library system might record information about the source document in the
user's personal library and in a group library to which the subscriber
has archival privileges. Group libraries are collaborative archives such
as a document repository for: a group working together on a project, a
group of academic researchers, a group web log, etc.

[0440]The life library can be organized in many ways: chronologically, by
topic, by level of the subscriber's interest, by type of publication
(newspaper, book, magazine, technical paper, etc.), where read, when
read, by ISBN or by Dewey decimal, etc. In one alternative, the system
can learn classifications based on how other subscribers have classified
the same document. The system can suggest classifications to the user or
automatically classify the document for the user.

[0441]In various embodiments, annotations may be inserted directly into
the document or may be maintained in a separate file. For example, when a
subscriber scans text from a newspaper article, the article is archived
in his Life Library with the scanned text highlighted. Alternatively, the
article is archived in his Life Library along with an associated
annotation file (thus leaving the archived document unmodified).
Embodiments of the system can keep a copy of the source document in each
subscriber's library, a copy in a master library that many subscribers
can access, or link to a copy held by the publisher.

[0442]In some embodiments, the Life Library stores only the user's
modifications to the document (e.g., highlights, etc.) and a link to an
online version of the document (stored elsewhere). The system or the
subscriber merges the changes with the document when the subscriber
subsequently retrieves the document.

[0443]If the annotations are kept in a separate file, the source document
and the annotation file are provided to the subscriber and the subscriber
combines them to create a modified document. Alternatively, the system
combines the two files prior to presenting them to the subscriber. In
another alternative, the annotation file is an overlay to the document
file and can be overlaid on the document by software in the subscriber's
computer.

[0444]Subscribers to the Life Library service pay a monthly fee to have
the system maintain the subscriber's archive. Alternatively, the
subscriber pays a small amount (e.g., a micro-payment) for each document
stored in the archive. Alternatively, the subscriber pays to access the
subscriber's archive on a per-access fee. Alternatively, subscribers can
compile libraries and allow others to access the materials/annotations on
a revenue share model with the Life Library service provider and
copyright holders. Alternatively, the Life Library service provider
receives a payment from the publisher when the Life Library subscriber
orders a document (a revenue share model with the publisher, where the
Life Library service provider gets a share of the publisher's revenue).

[0445]In some embodiments, the Life Library service provider acts as an
intermediary between the subscriber and the copyright holder (or
copyright holder's agent, such as the Copyright Clearance Center, a.k.a.
CCC) to facilitate billing and payment for copyrighted materials. The
Life Library service provider uses the subscriber's billing information
and other user account information to provide this intermediation
service. Essentially, the Life Library service provider leverages the
pre-existing relationship with the subscriber to enable purchase of
copyrighted materials on behalf of the subscriber.

[0446]In some embodiments, the Life Library system can store excerpts from
documents. For example, when a subscriber scans text from a paper
document, the regions around the scanned text are excerpted and placed in
the Life Library, rather than the entire document being archived in the
life library. This is especially advantageous when the document is long
because preserving the circumstances of the original scan prevents the
subscriber from re-reading the document to find the interesting portions.
Of course, a hyperlink to the entire electronic counterpart of the paper
document can be included with the excerpt materials.

[0447]In some embodiments, the system also stores information about the
document in the Life Library, such as author, publication title,
publication date, publisher, copyright holder (or copyright holder's
licensing agent), ISBN, links to public annotations of the document,
readrank, etc. Some of this additional information about the document is
a form of paper document metadata. Third parties may create public
annotation files for access by persons other than themselves, such the
general public. Linking to a third party's commentary on a document is
advantageous because reading annotation files of other users enhances the
subscriber's understanding of the document.

[0448]In some embodiments, the system archives materials by class. This
feature allows a Life Library subscriber to quickly store electronic
counterparts to an entire class of paper documents without access to each
paper document. For example, when the subscriber scans some text from a
copy of National Geographic magazine, the system provides the subscriber
with the option to archive all back issues of the National Geographic. If
the subscriber elects to archive all back issues, the Life Library
service provider would then verify with the National Geographic Society
whether the subscriber is authorized to do so. If not, the Life Library
service provider can mediate the purchase of the right to archive the
National Geographic magazine collection.

[0449]16.2. Life Saver

[0450]A variation on, or enhancement of, the Life Library concept is the
"Life Saver," where the system uses the text captured by a user to deduce
more about their other activities. The scanning of a menu from a
particular restaurant, a program from a particular theater performance, a
timetable at a particular railway station, or an article from a local
newspaper allows the system to make deductions about the user's location
and social activities, and could construct an automatic diary for them,
for example as a website. The user would be able to edit and modify the
diary, add additional materials such as photographs and, of course, look
again at the items scanned.

17. Academic Applications

[0451]Portable scanners supported by the described system have many
compelling uses in the academic setting. They can enhance student/teacher
interaction and augment the learning experience. Among other uses,
students can annotate study materials to suit their unique needs;
teachers can monitor classroom performance; and teachers can
automatically verify source materials cited in student assignments.

[0452]17.1. Children's Books

[0453]A child's interaction with a paper document, such as a book, is
monitored by a literacy acquisition system that employs a specific set of
embodiments of this system. The child uses a portable scanner that
communicates with other elements of the literacy acquisition system. In
addition to the portable scanner, the literacy acquisition system
includes a computer having a display and speakers, and a database
accessible by the computer. The scanner is coupled with the computer
(hardwired, short range RF, etc.). When the child sees an unknown word in
the book, the child scans it with the scanner. In one embodiment, the
literacy acquisition system compares the scanned text with the resources
in its database to identify the word. The database includes a dictionary,
thesaurus, and/or multimedia files (e.g., sound, graphics, etc.). After
the word has been identified, the system uses the computer speakers to
pronounce the word and its definition to the child. In another
embodiment, the word and its definition are displayed by the literacy
acquisition system on the computer's monitor. Multimedia files about the
scanned word can also be played through the computer's monitor and
speakers. For example, if a child reading "Goldilocks and the Three
Bears" scanned the word "bear," the system might pronounce the word
"bear" and play a short video about bears on the computer's monitor. In
this way, the child learns to pronounce the written word and is visually
taught what the word means via the multimedia presentation.

[0454]The literacy acquisition system provides immediate auditory and/or
visual information to enhance the learning process. The child uses this
supplementary information to quickly acquire a deeper understanding of
the written material. The system can be used to teach beginning readers
to read, to help children acquire a larger vocabulary, etc. This system
provides the child with information about words with which the child is
unfamiliar or about which the child wants more information.

[0455]17.2. Literacy Acquisition

[0456]In some embodiments, the system compiles personal dictionaries. If
the reader sees a word that is new, interesting, or particularly useful
or troublesome, the reader saves it (along with its definition) to a
computer file. This computer file becomes the reader's personalized
dictionary. This dictionary is generally smaller in size than a general
dictionary so can be downloaded to a mobile station or associated device
and thus be available even when the system isn't immediately accessible.
In some embodiments, the personal dictionary entries include audio files
to assist with proper word pronunciation and information identifying the
paper document from which the word was scanned.

[0457]In some embodiments, the system creates customized spelling and
vocabulary tests for students. For example, as a student reads an
assignment, the student may scan unfamiliar words with the portable
scanner. The system stores a list of all the words that the student has
scanned. Later, the system administers a customized spelling/vocabulary
test to the student on an associated monitor (or prints such a test on an
associated printer).

[0458]17.3. Music Teaching

[0459]The arrangement of notes on a musical staff is similar to the
arrangement of letters in a line of text. The same scanning device
discussed for capturing text in this system can be used to capture music
notation, and an analogous process of constructing a search against
databases of known musical pieces would allow the piece from which the
capture occurred to be identified which can then be retrieved, played, or
be the basis for some further action.

[0460]17.4. Detecting Plagiarism

[0461]Teachers can use the system to detect plagiarism or to verify
sources by scanning text from student papers and submitting the scanned
text to the system. For example, a teacher who wishes to verify that a
quote in a student paper came from the source that the student cited can
scan a portion of the quote and compare the title of the document
identified by the system with the title of the document cited by the
student. Likewise, the system can use scans of text from assignments
submitted as the student's original work to reveal if the text was
instead copied.

[0462]17.5. Enhanced Textbook

[0463]In some embodiments, capturing text from an academic textbook links
students or staff to more detailed explanations, further exercises,
student and staff discussions about the material, related example past
exam questions, further reading on the subject, recordings of the
lectures on the subject, and so forth. (See also Section 7.1.)

[0464]17.6. Language Learning

[0465]In some embodiments, the system is used to teach foreign languages.
Scanning a Spanish word, for example, might cause the word to be read
aloud in Spanish along with its definition in English.

[0466]The system provides immediate auditory and/or visual information to
enhance the new language acquisition process. The reader uses this
supplementary information to acquire quickly a deeper understanding of
the material. The system can be used to teach beginning students to read
foreign languages, to help students acquire a larger vocabulary, etc. The
system provides information about foreign words with which the reader is
unfamiliar or for which the reader wants more information.

[0467]Reader interaction with a paper document, such as a newspaper or
book, is monitored by a language skills system. The reader has a portable
scanner that communicates with the language skills system. In some
embodiments, the language skills system includes a computer having a
display and speakers, and a database accessible by the computer. The
scanner communicates with the computer (hardwired, short range RF, etc.).
When the reader sees an unknown word in an article, the reader scans it
with the scanner. The database includes a foreign language dictionary,
thesaurus, and/or multimedia files (sound, graphics, etc.). In one
embodiment, the system compares the scanned text with the resources in
its database to identify the scanned word. After the word has been
identified, the system uses the computer speakers to pronounce the word
and its definition to the reader. In some embodiments, the word and its
definition are both displayed on the computer's monitor. Multimedia files
about grammar tips related to the scanned word can also be played through
the computer's monitor and speakers. For example, if the words "to speak"
are scanned, the system might pronounce the word "hablar," play a short
audio clip that demonstrates the proper Spanish pronunciation, and
display a complete list of the various conjugations of "hablar." In this
way, the student learns to pronounce the written word, is visually taught
the spelling of the word via the multimedia presentation, and learns how
to conjugate the verb. The system can also present grammar tips about the
proper usage of "hablar" along with common phrases.

[0468]In some embodiments, the user scans a word or short phrase from a
rendered document in a language other than the user's native language (or
some other language that the user knows reasonably well). In some
embodiments, the system maintains a prioritized list of the user's
"preferred" languages. The system identifies the electronic counterpart
of the rendered document, and determines the location of the scan within
the document. The system also identifies a second electronic counterpart
of the document that has been translated into one of the user's preferred
languages, and determines the location in the translated document
corresponding to the location of the scan in the original document. When
the corresponding location is not known precisely, the system identifies
a small region (e.g., a paragraph) that includes the corresponding
location of the scanned location. The corresponding translated location
is then presented to the user. This provides the user with a precise
translation of the particular usage at the scanned location, including
any slang or other idiomatic usage that is often difficult to accurately
translate on a word-by-word basis.

[0469]17.7. Gathering Research Materials

[0470]A user researching a particular topic may encounter all sorts of
material, both in print and on screen, which they might wish to record as
relevant to the topic in some personal archive. The system would enable
this process to be automatic as a result of scanning a short phrase in
any piece of material, and could also create a bibliography suitable for
insertion into a publication on the subject.

18. Commercial Applications

[0471]Obviously, commercial activities could be made out of almost any
process discussed in this document, but here we concentrate on a few
obvious revenue streams.

[0472]18.1. Fee-Based Searching and Indexing

[0473]Conventional Internet search engines typically provide free search
of electronic documents, and also make no charge to the content providers
for including their content in the index. In some embodiments, the system
provides for charges to users and/or payments to search engines and/or
content providers in connection with the operation and use of the system.

[0474]In some embodiments, subscribers to the system's services pay a fee
for searches originating from scans of paper documents. For example, a
stockbroker may be reading a Wall Street Journal article about a new
product offered by Company X. By scanning the Company X name from the
paper document and agreeing to pay the necessary fees, the stockbroker
uses the system to search special or proprietary databases to obtain
premium information about the company, such as analyst's reports. The
system can also make arrangements to have priority indexing of the
documents most likely to be read in paper form, for example by making
sure all of the newspapers published on a particular day are indexed and
available by the time they hit the streets.

[0475]Content providers may pay a fee to be associated with certain terms
in search queries submitted from paper documents. For example, in one
embodiment, the system chooses a most preferred content provider based on
additional context about the provider (the context being, in this case,
that the content provider has paid a fee to be moved up the results
list). In essence, the search provider is adjusting paper document search
results based on pre-existing financial arrangements with a content
provider. See also the description of keywords and key phrases in Section
5.2.

[0476]Where access to particular content is to be restricted to certain
groups of people (such as clients or employees), such content may be
protected by a firewall and thus not generally indexable by third
parties. The content provider may nonetheless wish to provide an index to
the protected content. In such a case, the content provider can pay a
service provider to provide the content provider's index to system
subscribers. For example, a law firm may index all of a client's
documents. The documents are stored behind the law firm's firewall.
However, the law firm wants its employees and the client to have access
to the documents through the portable scanner so it provides the index
(or a pointer to the index) to the service provider, which in turn
searches the law firm's index when employees or clients of the law firm
submit paper-scanned search terms via their portable scanners. The law
firm can provide a list of employees and/or clients to the service
provider's system to enable this function or the system can verify access
rights by querying the law firm prior to searching the law firm's index.
Note that in the preceding example, the index provided by the law firm is
only of that client's documents, not an index of all documents at the law
firm. Thus, the service provider can only grant the law firm's clients
access to the documents that the law firm indexed for the client.

[0477]There are at least two separate revenue streams that can result from
searches originating from paper documents: one revenue stream from the
search function, and another from the content delivery function. The
search function revenue can be generated from paid subscriptions from the
scanner users, but can also be generated on a per-search charge. The
content delivery revenue can be shared with the content provider or
copyright holder (the service provider can take a percentage of the sale
or a fixed fee, such as a micropayment, for each delivery), but also can
be generated by a "referral" model in which the system gets a fee or
percentage for every item that the subscriber orders from the online
catalog and that the system has delivered or contributed to, regardless
of whether the service provider intermediates the transaction. In some
embodiments, the system service provider receives revenue for all
purchases that the subscriber made from the content provider, either for
some predetermined period of time or at any subsequent time when a
purchase of an identified product is made.

[0478]18.2. Catalogs

[0479]Consumers may use the portable scanner to make purchases from paper
catalogs. The subscriber scans information from the catalog that
identifies the catalog. This information is text from the catalog, a bar
code, or another identifier of the catalog. The subscriber scans
information identifying the products that s/he wishes to purchase. The
catalog mailing label may contain a customer identification number that
identifies the customer to the catalog vendor. If so, the subscriber can
also scan this customer identification number. The system acts as an
intermediary between the subscriber and the vendor to facilitate the
catalog purchase by providing the customer's selection and customer
identification number to the vendor.

[0480]18.3. Coupons

[0481]A consumer scans paper coupons and saves an electronic copy of the
coupon in the scanner, or in a remote device such as a computer, for
later retrieval and use. An advantage of electronic storage is that the
consumer is freed from the burden of carrying paper coupons. A further
advantage is that the electronic coupons may be retrieved from any
location. In some embodiments, the system can track coupon expiration
dates, alert the consumer about coupons that will expire soon, and/or
delete expired coupons from storage. An advantage for the issuer of the
coupons is the possibility of receiving more feedback about who is using
the coupons and when and where they are captured and used.

19. General Applications

[0482]19.1. Forms

[0483]The system may be used to auto-populate an electronic document that
corresponds to a paper form. A user scans in some text or a barcode that
uniquely identifies the paper form. The scanner communicates the identity
of the form and information identifying the user to a nearby computer.
The nearby computer has an Internet connection. The nearby computer can
access a first database of forms and a second database having information
about the user of the scanner (such as a service provider's subscriber
information database). The nearby computer accesses an electronic version
of the paper form from the first database and auto-populates the fields
of the form from the user's information obtained from the second
database. The nearby computer then emails the completed form to the
intended recipient. Alternatively, the computer could print the completed
form on a nearby printer.

[0484]Rather than access an external database, in some embodiments, the
system has a portable scanner that contains the user's information, such
as in an identity module, SIM, or security card. The scanner provides
information identifying the form to the nearby PC. The nearby PC accesses
the electronic form and queries the scanner for any necessary information
to fill out the form.

[0485]19.2. Business Cards

[0486]The system can be used to automatically populate electronic address
books or other contact lists from paper documents. For example, upon
receiving a new acquaintance's business card, a user can capture an image
of the card with his/her cellular phone. The system will locate an
electronic copy of the card, which can be used to update the cellular
phone's onboard address book with the new acquaintance's contact
information. The electronic copy may contain more information about the
new acquaintance than can be squeezed onto a business card. Further, the
onboard address book may also store a link to the electronic copy such
that any changes to the electronic copy will be automatically updated in
the cell phone's address book. In this example, the business card
optionally includes a symbol or text that indicates the existence of an
electronic copy. If no electronic copy exists, the cellular phone can use
OCR and knowledge of standard business card formats to fill out an entry
in the address book for the new acquaintance. Symbols may also aid in the
process of extracting information directly from the image. For example, a
phone icon next to the phone number on the business card can be
recognized to determine the location of the phone number.

[0487]19.3. Proofreading/Editing

[0488]The system can enhance the proofreading and editing process. One way
the system can enhance the editing process is by linking the editor's
interactions with a paper document to its electronic counterpart. As an
editor reads a paper document and scans various parts of the document,
the system will make the appropriate annotations or edits to an
electronic counterpart of the paper document. For example, if the editor
scans a portion of text and makes the "new paragraph" control gesture
with the scanner, a computer in communication with the scanner would
insert a "new paragraph" break at the location of the scanned text in the
electronic copy of the document.

[0489]19.4. Voice Annotation

[0490]A user can make voice annotations to a document by scanning a
portion of text from the document and then making a voice recording that
is associated with the scanned text. In some embodiments, the scanner has
a microphone to record the user's verbal annotations. After the verbal
annotations are recorded, the system identifies the document from which
the text was scanned, locates the scanned text within the document, and
attaches the voice annotation at that point. In some embodiments, the
system converts the speech to text and attaches the annotation as a
textual comment.

[0491]In some embodiments, the system keeps annotations separate from the
document, with only a reference to the annotation kept with the document.
The annotations then become an annotation markup layer to the document
for a specific subscriber or group of users.

[0492]In some embodiments, for each capture and associated annotation, the
system identifies the document, opens it using a software package,
scrolls to the location of the scan and plays the voice annotation. The
user can then interact with a document while referring to voice
annotations, suggested changes or other comments recorded either by
themselves or by somebody else.

[0493]19.5. Help In Text

[0494]The described system can be used to enhance paper documents with
electronic help menus. In some embodiments, a markup layer associated
with a paper document contains help menu information for the document.
For example, when a user scans text from a certain portion of the
document, the system checks the markup associated with the document and
presents a help menu to the user. The help menu is presented on a display
on the scanner or on an associated nearby display.

[0495]19.6. Use with Displays

[0496]In some situations, it is advantageous to be able to scan
information from a television, computer monitor, or other similar
display. In some embodiments, the portable scanner is used to scan
information from computer monitors and televisions. In some embodiments,
the portable optical scanner has an illumination sensor that is optimized
to work with traditional cathode ray tube (CRT) display techniques such
as rasterizing, screen blanking, etc.

[0497]A voice capture device which operates by capturing audio of the user
reading text from a document will typically work regardless of whether
that document is on paper, on a display, or on some other medium.

[0498]19.6.1. Public Kiosks and Dynamic Session IDs

[0499]One use of the direct scanning of displays is the association of
devices as described in Section 15.6. For example, in some embodiments, a
public kiosk displays a dynamic session ID on its monitor. The kiosk is
connected to a communication network such as the Internet or a corporate
intranet. The session ID changes periodically but at least every time
that the kiosk is used so that a new session ID is displayed to every
user. To use the kiosk, the subscriber scans in the session ID displayed
on the kiosk; by scanning the session ID, the user tells the system that
he wishes to temporarily associate the kiosk with his scanner for the
delivery of content resulting from scans of printed documents or from the
kiosk screen itself. The scanner may communicate the Session ID and other
information authenticating the scanner (such as a serial number, account
number, or other identifying information) directly to the system. For
example, the scanner can communicate directly (where "directly" means
without passing the message through the kiosk) with the system by sending
the session initiation message through the user's cell phone (which is
paired with the user's scanner via Bluetooth®). Alternatively, the
scanner can establish a wireless link with the kiosk and use the kiosk's
communication link by transferring the session initiation information to
the kiosk (perhaps via short range RF such as Bluetooth®, etc.); in
response, the kiosk sends the session initiation information to the
system via its Internet connection.

[0500]The system can prevent others from using a device that is already
associated with a scanner during the period (or session) in which the
device is associated with the scanner. This feature is useful to prevent
others from using a public kiosk before another person's session has
ended. As an example of this concept related to use of a computer at an
Internet cafe, the user scans a barcode on a monitor of a PC which s/he
desires to use; in response, the system sends a session ID to the monitor
that it displays; the user initiates the session by scanning the session
ID from the monitor (or entering it via a keypad or touch screen or
microphone on the portable scanner); and the system associates in its
databases the session ID with the serial number (or other identifier that
uniquely identifies the user's scanner) of his/her scanner so another
scanner cannot scan the session ID and use the monitor during his/her
session. The scanner is in communication (through wireless link such as
Bluetooth®, a hardwired link such as a docking station, etc.) with a
PC associated with the monitor or is in direct (i.e., w/o going through
the PC) communication with the system via another means such as a
cellular phone, etc.

[0501]Part IV--System Details

[0502]In the system described above, users can subscribe to various
services offered by a service provider. These services support the use of
handheld document data capture devices. Such services can include
communication, transaction intermediation (e.g., providing payment to a
vendor for purchases made by the subscriber with the handheld device),
search, data processing (e.g., network assisted OCR, location
determination, etc.), data archiving (e.g., life library), and many
others. For example, a service provider might provide communication and
search functions for a mobile phone so that it can be used to capture
information from a document and wirelessly communicate the information to
a search engine.

[0503]In one aspect, information is captured from a rendered document, and
markup data associated with the rendered document is applied to at least
in part determine actions and/or behaviors available to a user of the
handheld document data capture device. In some embodiments, electronic
counterparts of the rendered document may be located. Markup data can be
stored, among other locations, in an electronic counterpart to a rendered
document, in a separate document corresponding to a rendered document, in
a database, in a file of metadata associated with one or more rendered
documents. The markup data may include information associated with the
rendered document and/or its electronic counterpart. The markup data may
be applied to determine actions to take on and/or involving the captured
information. Markup data may be applied to determine actions and/or
behaviors available to a user of the handheld document data capture
device and/or actions using and/or involving the electronic counterpart.
Markup data may be applied in a hierarchical manner to determine actions
and/or behaviors available to a user of the handheld document data
capture device and/or actions using and/or involving the electronic
counterpart.

[0504]FIG. 4 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a system to support
document interaction. The environment comprises a rendered document 426,
a handheld document data capture device 402, and a computing device 404.
In some embodiments, the handheld device 402 can capture information
optically (e.g., optical scan) or audibly (e.g., voice capture). Thus
various embodiments of the capture device 402 can be a portable scanner,
voice annotator, mobile phone with or without camera, and any other
device suitable for capturing information from rendered document 426. The
environment further comprises a network 406, and various electronic
counterparts 416-418. In one embodiment, the environment further
comprises a user repository of information 410. In some embodiments, the
user repository can be a database under control of a service provider
(e.g., a mobile communications service provider) or under control of the
user perhaps via a host computer such as 404. Examples of a user
repository are subscriber accounts and local data caches. The computing
device 404 comprises logic 412 for facilitating acts described herein.
Logic comprises signals embodied in memory and/or circuits that may be
applied to affect the operation of a device. Software and firmware are
examples of logic. Logic may also be embodied in circuits (such as logic
gates) and in combinations of software and circuits.

[0505]The network 406 also may include logic 414 to facilitate acts
described herein. In one embodiment, the handheld document data capture
device 402 includes control logic or a processor as discussed elsewhere
in this document. The computing device 404 optionally comprises a display
422, and possibly additional input/output devices as well, for example a
mouse, touchpad, keyboard, speakers, a microphone, a wired or wireless
network and/or telephone line interface, and so on.

[0506]Although depicted in FIG. 4 as a separate entity, the user
repository 410 may comprise memory that is stored, for example, within
handheld document data capture device 402, within computing device 404,
within another computing device accessible to the user such as a personal
computer, or within memory that is part of network 406. The environment
may comprise more than one user repository 410. For example, one or more
separate user repositories 410 may be stored in memories within any of
handheld document data capture device 402, computing device 404, and
network 406. The types of information stored may comprise instances of
captured information, actions associated with instances of captured
information, and capture context information, among numerous examples.
Further, separate user repositories 410 may be used to store different
types of information.

[0507]The handheld document data capture device 402 may comprise a small,
portable device, possibly battery operated. The handheld document data
capture device 402 may be the approximate size of a key fob, credit card,
or other device conveniently transported in a pocket, on a key chain, in
a wallet, etc. The handheld document data capture device 402 may comprise
at least part of a pen-style device, a mouse, a cell phone, a remote
control, a personal digital assistant, and/or a camera, among numerous
possibilities. The handheld document data capture device may additionally
or alternatively comprise at least part of a laptop, desktop, or other
computer.

[0508]In some embodiments the computing device 404 and the handheld
document data capture device 402 are physically attached or combined. In
some embodiments the computing device 404 and the handheld document data
capture device 402 are physically separate or not combined. An example of
a physical attachment is a handheld document data capture device feature
in a cellular phone with digital camera, the combined device being a
"smart" phone that can perform some computing tasks and has an Internet
interface. An example of a physical distinctness is a handheld document
data capture device provided in a "fat pen" shaped device that may be
carried anywhere by a user and that uses wireless communication to
communicate with a PDA or computer.

[0509]The computing device 404 may be a cell phone, personal digital
assistant, desktop computer, laptop computer, portable music player,
television, or set top box, among numerous possibilities. The network 406
can include the Internet, an intranet (e.g. a corporate network or other
network of a legal entity), a home network, or some other telephone or
data network (e.g. a local phone company, cell phone company, or cable
television company network and so on).

[0510]Information from a document 426 rendered on a print media or an
optical screen is captured to a handheld document data capture device
memory. Optically capturing (i.e., scanning) comprises applying a charge
coupled device or a contact image sensor in order to distinguish optical
information such as contrasts and color differences between rendered
information and a background of a page or optical display. The handheld
document data capture device memory may be, for example, a flash memory
or a dynamically refreshed random access memory.

[0511]The captured information may include one or more image fragments of
the document 426. The handheld document data capture device 402, the
computing device 404, or the network 406 may process the captured
information, resulting in captured information in the form of text
produced from, or encodings or other analyses of, one or more image
fragments. Alternatively, the processing may result in captured
information in the form of a parametric representation of captured
symbols, or a statistical representation of captured symbols. Examples of
a parametric representation of captured symbols include information about
a type or types of the captured symbols (e.g. fonts, styles, etc.),
counts or relative positions of the captured symbols of various types, an
overall number of captured symbols, a number of captured words, a count
of stop and non-stop words or symbols, or the frequency of occurrence of
words or symbols of various types.

[0512]Numerous captures may be performed. Information from each capture
may be stored in the handheld document data capture device memory.
Subsequent to capturing or as capturing occurs, upon communication
between the handheld document data capture device 402 and the separate
computing device 404 or network 406, the captured information which has
previously been obtained and is stored in captured memory or at that
point is being obtained may be transferred to the separate computing
device 404 or to the network 406. Communication between the handheld
document data capture device 402 and the separate computing device 404 or
network 406 may involve wires or optical fibers or may be accomplished
via wireless communication such as BlueTooth® communication.

[0513]Establishing communication between the handheld document data
capture device 402 and the separate computing device 404 or the network
406 may be triggered, for one example, by docking the handheld document
data capture device 402 in a cradle coupled to the separate computing
device 404 or network 406. In a second example communication is
established by establishing a wireless connection when the handheld
document data capture device 402 comes within wireless communication
range of the separate computing device 404 or network 406. In a third
example communication is established by completing a Plug and Play
connection between the handheld document data capture device 402 and the
separate computing device 404 or network 406 (e.g. via a Universal Serial
Bus connection).

[0514]The handheld document data capture device 402, computing device 404,
and/or the network 406 may process captured information as it is
collected for various reasons. For example, the captured information may
be processed as collected to determine when sufficient information has
been captured to identify actions that may be performed with or involving
the captured information. In a second example, the captured information
may be examined as it is collected to identify a target location within a
document (or target locations within one or more documents) associated
with the instance.

[0515]In some embodiments, the handheld document data capture device may
communicate with the user performing the capture to inform the user of
the conclusions of its processing. In one case, the handheld document
data capture device 402 may include a light emitting diode (LED) to
notify a user of the handheld document data capture device 402 when
sufficient captured information has been obtained to locate a document
comprising the captured information. Other manners of signaling the user
include providing a tone, beep, or other auditory signal, providing an
indication on a display, or producing a vibration.

[0516]Processing of information associated with the electronic counterpart
may determine actions and/or behaviors available to a user of the
handheld document data capture device. Many actions may be associated
with the captured information. Examples comprise commerce operations
(e.g. purchasing a product, reviewing product information, linking to an
affiliate sales, promotional, or marketing site, and so on); retrieving
the captured document or a portion thereof electronically to a display or
memory; associating user created content such as annotations with the
content; identifying or retrieving other information related to the
content such as advertisements, definitions, translations, or
biographical or historical information; controlling some other device or
system based on the content. Additionally, actions may be identified to
occur after the information retrieved as a result of the capturing is
further analyzed, for example, by determining from which regions (e.g.,
advertising or editorial regions) the information was captured.

[0517]The handheld document data capture device 402, while in an off-line
state (e.g. not in active communication with the computing device 404
and/or network 406), may perform processing to determine at least one of
an action or actions associated with the captured information or to
facilitate the recognition of a document or documents associated with the
captured information. Alternatively or additionally, such processing may
be performed upon establishing communication between the handheld
document data capture device 402 and the computing device 404 or network
406. In some embodiments, the captured information is processed for use
in a search query that is submitted to a search engine or other location
function 408, to locate an electronic document or documents 416-418
either comprising the captured information, or comprising related
information. The captured information may be processed to form, at least
in part, a Uniform Resource Locator or other link to content of a
network, for example to form a link to product information. The captured
information may be processed to, at least in part, determine a product or
class of products, or advertisements associated therewith. The results of
such processing (for example, associated actions, one or more determined
target locations in associated documents, search query results, links to
other content) may be stored in a user repository 410 associated with the
captured information.

[0518]The captured information may be processed to determine the contents
of a menu of options presented in conjunction with interaction with the
document 426, e.g. to provide document interaction options for a user of
the handheld document data capture device. In one embodiment, when
captured information is processed while the handheld document data
capture device 402 is in an on-line state, a determined menu of options
is presented to the user, for example on display 422 of computing device
404. Depending on circumstances, a user may or may not respond by making
a selection from the presented menu before capturing additional
information. When captured information is collected while the handheld
document data capture device 402 is in an off-line state, the captured
information may be temporarily stored in the capture device 402 or a host
computer 404. In another embodiment, captured data is stored in the user
repository 410 with context information. Such context information may
include, for example, an indication as to whether the data was captured
when the handheld document data capture device was in an off-line state,
whether the user has already responded by selecting one or more choices
from a presented menu of options associated with the captured data, and
whether the captured data has been designated by the user as having a
particular status.

[0519]FIG. 5 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a method of mapping
capture information to actions. The capture device 402 is used to capture
information from the document 426. Markup data 504 is applied to
determine actions and/or behaviors (herein actions and/or behaviors may
sometimes be referred to simply as actions) 506 to perform using and/or
involving the captured information. The markup data 504 may additionally
or alternatively be applied to digital content 503 associated with the
document 426 (for example, an electronic version of the document 426).
Capture context 512 information may also be applied to determine the
actions.

[0520]Information captured may include textual information, symbols,
graphics, icons, watermarks, or codes such as barcodes. In some cases,
the graphics, icons, watermarks or codes may correspond with markup
information in the markup data. In some embodiments, the markup
information may provide an indication of a publication comprising or
likely comprising the document. Additionally or alternatively, an
advertisement, series of words within text, page header or portion
thereof, or page footer or portion thereof may be used in article or
publication identification. Examples of an indication of a publication
comprising or likely comprising the document include an indication of a
periodical comprising the document, the indication of the periodical
ascertained according to at least one of words or phrases of the
information from the capture. Additionally, fonts, contrast, color, and
other information of the document may be obtained by capturing. Examples
of information derived at least in part from the information from the
capture include at least one of a keyword, icon, symbol, phrase, name or
other identifying indicia of a person, place, organization, entity, role,
status, or job title.

[0521]Information associated with the rendered document 426, and applied
to determine actions associated with a capture, is referred to herein as
"markup data". A markup data can include data or rules and is generally
an electronic file separate from the electronic counterpart 503 and the
rendered document 426. In some embodiments, information associated with
the rendered document 426 can include metadata and database entries
mapping regions of the document 426 to its electronic counterpart 503 and
comprising at least one of actions or rules for determining actions based
on mappings, metadata, and/or context data.

[0522]If the markup data 504 contains layout information, the location
within rendered document 426 from which the data is captured can at least
partially determine a context 512 of the captured information. Applying
layout information can include associating areas of the rendered document
426 with actions and/or rules to determine actions. Layout information of
the electronic counterpart 503 may include a Hypertext Markup Language
file comprising at least a portion of the electronic counterpart 503.
Actions taken as a result of capturing information from rendered document
426 can include retrieving all or portions of electronic counterpart 503
associated with the document 426.

[0523]Statistical information about the document 426 may include
probabilities that symbols would occur in the document 426 if the
document 426 belonged to a predetermined classification. Other
statistical information that may be used comprises at least one of usage
statistics, transaction statistics, or access statistics. The statistics
may be for one individual, such as the user initiating the capture, or
for more than one persons who have interacted with versions of the same
or similar documents. The statistics may be for access to/usage of/or
transactions initiated for a region of the document 426 (e.g. a page or
paragraph), the entire document 426 (e.g. an entire article), a document
higher in a document hierarchy (e.g. magazine or on-line website), prior
usage of articles with associated content categories, or many other
statistical aggregations. Examples of a parametric representation of
symbols in the document 426 include information about at least one of the
type of symbols in the document 426, the relative position of symbols of
various types, or the frequency of occurrence of symbols of various
types. An action may be identified and ranked (e.g. its desirability
determined, sometimes in relation to other potential actions) and/or
rules applied for determining actions based at least in part on
statistical characteristics identified as a part of the digital content
503 associated with a capture.

[0524]Context points are locations, text, or symbols within a rendered
document that are defined in markup data or are otherwise associated by
the system with an action. Proximity to context points is useful to
determine actions in response to a data capture. Context points within
the document 426 may include a title, heading, photo, illustration,
caption, footnote, endnote, citation, keyword, name, location, phone
number, or address, among other things. Distance of the captured
information from the context point may be measured in words, sentences,
paragraphs, pages, or a physical distance, such as inches.

[0525]Additionally, the location of part or all of captured information
may be relative to an identified document region. Identifying a region or
regions of the document 426 may include delineating physical areas of the
document 426, or defining regions by way of rules or the nature of the
content therein. Regions may be assigned a type or types. A document 426
may include regions that at least partially overlap. Region types which
may be identified include a product or products region, advertising,
sports, news, political, science, technology, hobby, entertainment,
opinion, finance, business, classifieds, art, real estate, or a subject
region, among other things. Selecting actions associated with, and/or
applying rules for determining actions associated with, the region or
regions may include selecting at least one of an intersection or union of
actions associated with, and/or applying at least one of an intersection
or union of rules for determining actions associated with, a region or
regions.

[0526]An action may be identified and ranked (e.g. its desirability
determined, sometimes in relation to other potential actions) and/or
rules applied for determining actions based at least in part on the
captured information's distance to one or more context points and/or
keywords and/or markup items and/or its location within or near a
document region.

[0527]Determining actions to take in association with a capture may
include determining at least one category for the electronic counterpart
503 associated with the rendered document 426, and selecting an action or
actions associated with the category. Determining categories may include
a lookup of categories previously associated with the electronic
counterpart 503, or an "on the fly" analysis of at least a portion of the
electronic counterpart 503 to determine categories to associate with the
document 426.

[0528]Capture context 512 may include an indication of a publication
comprising or likely comprising the document 426. The capture context 512
may include a manner in which the capture was performed, a time of day or
date or combination thereof at which or during which the capture was
performed, a location in the document 426 from which the captured
information was obtained, a physical location at which the capture was
performed, and/or environment signals proximate in time with the capture.
The capture context 512 may include information derived at least in part
from the information from the capture, capture habits for a person
performing the capture, and/or capture habits for a group with which the
person performing the capture is associated. The capture context 512 may
include at least one attribute of a person performing the capture, and/or
at least one attribute of a group with which the person performing the
capture is associated.

[0529]Examples of a physical location at which the capture may be
performed include a vehicle, a room, a building, a town or city, a
neighborhood, a block, a geographic location, or a functional area. The
capture context 512 may include signals proximate in time with the
capture e.g. a short time prior to the capture, substantially
contemporaneous with the capture, a short time after the capture, or a
time interval prior to or after the capture wherein no there are no
intervening events or signals to indicate that the environment has
changed or is changing.

[0530]Examples of environment signals (i.e., environmental context)
include at least one of a spoken word, phrase, command, name, or sound
that is not a language element. Environment signals may include sounds
made by nearby activity, conversational sounds, animal, weather, water,
or other natural sounds, and sounds of machinery or appliances or tools.
Environment signals may also include temperature signals, light level
signals, touch pad signals, or signals resulting from the operation of
buttons or other controls. Environment signals may also include image
information from the local environment, or detection of the presence of a
wireless signal, a local radio station, the availability of a wireless
network or the proximity of a cellular base station

[0531]Other examples of environment signals include persons identified
from voice information collected from the local environment, persons
identified from image information collected from the local environment,
and objects identified from image information collected from the local
environment. Capture habits (i.e., user history) for a person may include
information the person has captured in the past, prior capture behavior
of the person, subscriptions of or related to the person, or expressed or
inferred content preferences of the person. Habits for a group with which
the person performing the capture is associated may include capture
habits of people in the same or similar demographic group such as age,
income, people who had captured the same or similar information in the
past, people who live in the same geographic region, etc.

[0532]As shown in FIG. 5, the capture context information 512 may at least
partially determine actions to take on and/or involving the electronic
counterpart 503, and/or actions involving the captured information.
Captured information may partially or completely determine the likely
document from which the information was captured. For example, a short
phrase may sufficiently identify the document 426. As another example, it
may be known that based on the known user and the time of day and font
size and contrast, a particular newspaper comprises the document from
which the information was captured.

[0533]Examples of a manner in which the capture was performed include a
direction of the capture over the document 426, one or more velocity
metrics of the capture over the document 426, one or more acceleration
metrics of the capture over the document 426, or one or more paths or
path components of the capture over the document 426. Paths or path
components of the capture may include a predetermined gesture, symbol, or
behavioral pattern.

[0534]Using any or all of the above sources, potential actions to take or
present for selection as a result of the capture may be determined. The
handheld document data capture device user may be presented with menu
choices reflecting potential actions. In some cases actions, such as
associated electronic counterpart retrieval, may automatically occur. The
retrieved content 503 may or may not be automatically be rendered or
otherwise made available to the user. The menu choices may be ordered to
reflect the ranking of the actions. Ranking an action may include
determining the likelihood that a user of the handheld document data
capture device will select the action; thus the menu choice ordering may
reflect most probable user choices.

[0535]FIG. 6 is a flow chart of an embodiment of a process to determine
automatic and selectable actions based upon captured information. At 602
information is captured. At 604 digital content associated with the
document from which the information was captured is located. At 606
markup data is applied to determine actions/behaviors available to a user
of the handheld document data capture device, or actions/behaviors to
undertake using or involving the captured information or using or
involving the digital content. If at 607 there are automatic actions
determined for the captured information and/or digital content, those
automatic actions are performed at 610. Otherwise, if at 608 there are
user-selectable actions determined, an action menu is displayed to the
user at 612. At 614 the process concludes.

[0536]Examples of actions available to a user of the handheld document
data capture device include at least one of access to a product sale
and/or promotion, access to a chat room, creation of or access to a
discussion thread, access to a bulletin board, placing a bookmark in the
electronic counterpart, viewing enhancements to the electronic
counterpart, making enhancements to the electronic counterpart, emailing
of, or otherwise transmitting, at least a portion of the electronic
counterpart, adding at least a portion of the electronic counterpart to a
web page, perform a spelling or grammar check, retrieve an associated
image or video or sound clip, retrieve associated text, perform a
language translation on at least a portion of the electronic counterpart,
retrieve an associated web page (e.g. related and/or affiliate linking),
or performing a search for related material. Examples of actions to take
on and/or involving the electronic counterpart include generating a
charge based on an access charge to the electronic counterpart associated
with the rendered document, or a portion or portions thereof, storing a
copy of the electronic counterpart or a link to the electronic
counterpart in a personal archive of the user, highlighting or otherwise
annotating at least a portion of the electronic counterpart, printing
and/or a manner of printing at least a portion of the electronic
counterpart, dialing a phone number comprised by the captured
information, locating a phone number and/or address or other personal or
professional information for a person whose name was comprised by the
captured information, and displaying and/or indicating how to display at
least a portion of the electronic counterpart, to name just some of the
possible examples.

[0537]FIG. 7 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a technique to map
information from multiple sources to actions. Information associated with
the one or more related documents is applied to determine actions and/or
behaviors available to a user of the handheld document data capture
device and/or actions using and/or involving the electronic counterpart.
Documents 702 and 704 are related to the document 426, the document from
which information is captured using the handheld document data capture
device 402. Examples of documents related to the rendered document
include at least one of documents from the same or similar publication,
documents sharing a common author, documents from a same or similar
genre, documents having similar keywords and/or subjects, or documents
from a same or similar category. Each document 702, 704 has corresponding
and/or common (shared) markup data 706, 708. Capture information, digital
context (derived from any one, two, or all three of documents 426, 702,
704) and capture context are evaluated based on the markup data 504, 706,
and 708. The actions are combined by a combiner 710 to determine a final
set of actions 506 to take automatically or make available for user
selection.

[0538]In selecting actions associated with, and/or applying rules for
determining actions associated with, some of the digital context will
have been evaluated based on its joint characteristics in the multiple
documents. For example, region analysis and the identification and
ranking of actions based on regions, may be determined in part by the
combined characteristics of regions in the documents 426, 702, and 704.
For example, a purchase action may not be given a high rank based on its
location with respect to a region of topic automobile accessories in
document 426 alone, but regional analysis of documents 702 and 704 may
cause the action to be ranked highly.

[0539]FIG. 8 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a technique to map
capture information from a document hierarchy to actions. In this
embodiment, processing captured information may include determining one
or more other documents, other than the document identified as directly
captured, within a document hierarchy for the capture. Examples of
document hierarchy include a page within an article within a magazine, a
page within a section within a newspaper, or a page within a chapter
within a book within an anthology.

[0540]Documents 702, 704 and 426 form a document hierarchy. Each document
702, 704, 426 has corresponding markup data 706, 708, 504 that form a
markup data hierarchy. Actions are determined from the markup data
hierarchy 706, 708, 504, and the actions are combined by a combiner 710
to determine a final set of actions and/or behaviors 506 available and/or
to take with or involving the captured information and/or digital
content. Analysis of digital content for this embodiment may, in some
cases, involve applying rules and/or selecting and ranking actions based
on combined document 426, 702, 704 characteristics. For example, content
categories may be evaluated for likely importance to the user and thus
potentially action ranking for ad selection may be performed based on the
document hierarchy. Region analysis may be based on the document
hierarchy.

[0541]Disclosed are various methods of interacting with rendered documents
by use of a handheld document data capture device such as a portable
scanner to capture information from a rendered document. In some
embodiments, the system locates an electronic counterpart corresponding
to the rendered document. In one embodiment, the system applies
electronic markup data associated with the rendered document to determine
actions and/or behaviors available to the user of the scanner. In some
embodiments the actions and/or behaviors are presented to the user in
menu form, either on the capture device or an associated display, with
the most likely actions/behaviors at the top of the menu.

[0542]The system can determine which of a wide range of interactions are
offered to the user. To do so, it may be necessary to determine a
location in the document from which the information was captured, such as
the proximity to features (sometimes referred to as "context points") in
the document such as titles, headings, photos, illustrations, captions,
footnotes, endnotes, citations, keywords, names, locations, phone
numbers, or addresses. Some embodiments of the disclosed system can
determine the captured information's distance from one or more context
points within the document. The system can rank an action based at least
in part on the distance to context points in the document. Distance
within documents can be measured by word distance, sentence distance,
paragraph distance, or physical distance. The system can used distance
information to predict the likelihood that the capture device's user will
select a particular action, thus allowing the system to rank certain
processes based on the probability that they will be selected.

[0543]Some embodiments of the system will refer to electronic markup data
to interpret the captured data from the rendered document. The markup
data typically contains markup information that is associated with system
actions and behaviors. Keyword definitions, symbols, actions, and
predetermined rules for system behavior, are some examples of markup
information.

[0544]Some embodiments of the system can determine categories with which
the electronic content is associated. After the category is determined,
the system will select an action or actions associated with the category.
Documents can be categorized in many ways. Just a few of those ways are
by author, by subject matter, by type of document (e.g., book, magazine,
newspaper, webpage, etc.), by the authors employer, etc. Some well-known
categorization schemes are the Dewey Decimal System, the Library of
Congress Classification System, and the Superintendent of Documents
Classification System. In some embodiments, the system can categorize
documents that have not yet been categorized by analyzing the captured
data, the electronic counterpart, context of the capture, and any other
suitable data available.

[0545]When a capture location has been identified, the system can select
actions associated with the location by reference to the electronic
markup data. Some system embodiments may apply rules to determine actions
associated with the location. These rules can be based on capture
context, such as the capture location or time, and can affect the action
selected from the markup data. In some embodiments, the system can use
the rules to select multiple actions or to select one action from among
several possible actions.

[0546]In some embodiments, the markup data identifies special regions
within the rendered document. For example in a newspaper, the markup data
could specify special regions such as an advertising region, a product or
products region, a sports region, a news region, a political region, a
science region, a technology region, a hobby region, an entertainment
region, an opinion region, a finance region, a business region, a
classifieds region, an arts region, a real estate region, or a subject
region. When the capture location is determined, it can be mapped to the
special regions defined by the markup data. The regions can overlap in
some embodiments, which allows a data capture from one location to
trigger multiple rules or actions associated with the overlapping
regions.

[0547]Some system embodiments will take document hierarchies into account
when choosing which markup rules to apply. Some examples of document
hierarchies are a page within an article within a magazine; a page within
a section within a newspaper; and a page within a chapter within a book.
For example, if the system is using a page/section/newspaper hierarchy,
at least three sets of markup data could apply to the first page of the
sports section of the Seattle Times newspaper: markup data specific to
the first page; markup data that applies to the entire sports section;
and markup data that applies to the entire newspaper. When selecting
rules and/or actions to apply in response to a data capture from the
first page of the sports section, the system may analyze all three sets
of markup data. Various rules may apply to determine precedence amongst
the three sets of markup data. Depending upon the precedence rules, the
system can resolve conflicts amongst the markup data. A precedence rule
may specify that the markup data for the specific page overrides the
section and newspaper markup data. In this example, the system would
first examine the page markup data to determine if a keyword is in a data
capture from the sports page. If the system doesn't find a keyword, it
may proceed to examine the sports section markup data and then the
newspaper markup data. Many other precedence rules can apply, including
rules that take context into account. For example, a precedence rule may
specify that the section markup takes precedence over the page markup for
a predefined time period. After the time period expires, the system
defaults to the normal precedence rules and behaviors/actions in the page
markup data would take precedence over those in the section markup data.

[0549]The captured information can include an image fragment (e.g., an
image of a portion of rendered document), text produced from an image
fragment (e.g., by OCR), a parametric representation of symbols in the
rendered document, or statistical information about the content of the
document. Statistical information can include probabilities that symbols
would occur in the document if the document belonged to a predetermined
classification. Parametric representation of symbols in a document can
include information about at least one of the type of symbols in the
document, the relative position of symbols of various types, and/or the
frequency of occurrence of symbols of various types. Parametric
representation is useful with the autocorrelation/convolution methods
described elsewhere in this document.

[0550]In some embodiments, actions and/or behaviors available to a user of
the handheld document data capture device can include access to a product
sale and/or promotion, access to a chat room, creation of or access to a
discussion thread, access to a bulletin board, placing a bookmark in the
electronic content, viewing enhancements to the electronic content,
making enhancements to the electronic content, emailing at least a
portion of the electronic content, adding at least a portion of the
electronic content to a web page, perform a spelling or grammar check,
retrieve an associated image or video or sound clip, retrieve associated
text, perform a language translation on at least a portion of the
electronic content, retrieve an associated web page, or perform a search
for related material.

[0551]In some embodiments, the system uses context information about the
data capture, document, or user to assist in determining actions and/or
behaviors available to the user of the scanner. Examples of context
information include data capture location (e.g., within the document),
time of data capture, geographic location when the data was captured,
distribution of the rendered document, and user history.

[0553]Examples of actions that can be determined are: identifying markup
information in the scanned information, the markup information associated
with actions; determining the distance the scanned information from a
keyword in the rendered document; determining at least one category with
which the rendered document is associated, and selecting an action based
on the determined category; identifying a region of the document from
which the information was captured, and selecting actions associated
with, and/or applying rules for determining actions associated with, the
region or regions;

[0554]The captured information can include a publication indication (e.g.,
a document signature). Examples of such an indication include a bar code,
icon, symbol, advertisement, page header or portion thereof, page footer
or portion thereof, or other document identifier. The publication
indication can also include an indication of a periodical document, the
indication of the periodical ascertained according to at least one of
words or phrases of the information from the scan, the time of day or
location of the scan, or attributes of the person performing the scan.

[0555]Data capture context can include data about the manner in which the
capture was performed. For example, data about the manner in which an
optical scan was performed can include the scan direction, the scan
velocity over the document, scan acceleration, and the scan path. In some
scanner embodiments, gestural commands are determined by analysis of the
scan path.

[0556]Data capture context can also include a geographic location at which
the scan was performed. The geographic location can be at various levels
of precision depending upon the system embodiment and the precision
necessary for the action the system is taking. Some systems can determine
the user's location at the level of a vehicle, a room, a building, a
neighborhood, a town, a state, or a country.

[0557]Data capture context can also include information about the user's
environment at the time of data capture. If the data capture device
includes the ability to capture sounds, such environment information
includes sounds made by nearby activity, conversational sounds, animal,
weather, water, or other natural sounds, and sounds of machinery or
appliances or tools. For appropriately equipped devices, environment
information can include temperature and light level. In some embodiments,
environment information includes images captured from the local
environment. For example, a mobile phone user could take pictures of
nearby landmarks that could be used to determine the user's location
context.

[0558]Data capture context can include the user's history, the aggregate
history of any groups to which the user belongs, and the aggregate
history of all the service provider's subscribers. The user's history can
include what the person has scanned in the past, prior scan manners of
the person, subscriptions of or related to the person, or expressed or
inferred content preferences of the person. Users can be grouped by
demographics such as age group, income group, people who had scanned the
same or similar information in the past, people who live in the same
geographic region, etc. Users can also be aggregated according to the
groups or associations to which they belong, such as by employer, fan
clubs, alumni associations, etc.

[0559]The layout of the rendered document can provide important context
information to the system. For example, the system can use layout context
such that scanning the word "purchase" within an advertisement will
initiate a purchase of the advertised product but scanning the word
"purchase" within the text of an article would not.

[0560]In some embodiments, the markup data associates rules, instructions,
and data with specific areas of the rendered document.

[0561]Some embodiments of the disclosed system implement a method of
interacting with a rendered document by using a handheld data capture
device to capture information from a rendered document; analyzing the
captured information for keywords or other markup information; and
referring to the rendered document's markup data to determine actions
and/or behaviors available to a user of the data capture device. In some
embodiments, the actions and/or behaviors are presented to the user of
the handheld device as menu choices on the handheld device or an
associated computing device.

[0562]In some embodiments, the method includes determining a location in
the document from which the information was captured. Examples of
locations include proximity to at least one of a title, heading, photo,
illustration, caption, footnote, endnote, citation, keyword, name,
location, phone number, or address.

[0563]In some embodiments, the method includes determining the distance of
the captured information from one or more context points within the
document, and ranking an action based at least in part on distance.
Distance can be measured in words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, or
physical distance (e.g., inches, centimeters, etc). Ranking can take into
account the likelihood that a user of the capture device will select the
action. In general, it is most likely that the user will take the action
associated with the nearest context point. Examples of context points are
titles, headings, photos, illustrations, captions, footnotes, endnotes,
citations, keywords, names, locations, phone numbers, or addresses.

[0564]Examples of captured information include text, barcodes, icons,
fonts, sub-visual patterns, tokens and symbols. An example of a
sub-visual pattern is a watermark.

[0565]Examples of actions that embodiments of the system can perform are
purchasing access or copyrights to the electronic counterpart of the
rendered document, storing a copy of the electronic counterpart or a link
to the electronic counterpart in a personal archive, highlighting or
otherwise annotating the electronic counterpart, printing the electronic
counterpart, dialing a phone number comprised by the captured
information, locating a phone number and/or address for a person whose
name was comprised by the captured information, displaying the electronic
counterpart to the user of the capture device. Some embodiments will
apply context information to determine actions to take on and/or
involving the electronic counterpart and/or the rendered document.

[0566]Examples of capture context include the user's scan habits, perhaps
from the user history portion of the subscriber account or from cookies
on the handheld device. The scan habits for any groups with which the
user is associated can also be used as capture context. Examples of
capture habits are what the person has captured in the past (e.g., always
scans data from the Dallas Morning News), prior capture behavior of the
person (e.g., only scans data in the morning), subscriptions of or
related to the person, or expressed or inferred content preferences of
the person.

[0567]The markup data can also be associated with documents related to the
rendered document. Examples of types of documents that are related to the
rendered document include documents from the same or similar publication,
documents sharing a common author, documents from a same or similar
genre, documents having similar keywords and/or subjects, or documents
from a same or similar category.

[0568]The disclosed system supports a method of using a handheld document
data capture device to interact with a rendered document, the method
including using a scanner to scan information from a rendered document;
identifying at least one other document of a document hierarchy to which
the document belongs; and applying information associated with the
documents of the hierarchy to determine actions and/or behaviors
available to a user of the scanner and/or actions using and/or involving
the electronic content.

[0569]Although the system has been discussed primarily in the context of
markup data that is associated with a rendered document, some embodiments
of the system have global markup data that is associated with more than
one document. This global markup data can be used to interpret and act on
captured information even when the rendered document has not been
identified and does not have an electronic counterpart. For example, the
latest edition of the Financial Times may be so new that it has not yet
been indexed by any search engines and a copy of it has not been posted
to the Web. When a user scans information from it with his portable
scanner, the system may not be able to identify the document or locate an
electronic copy of it. The system can, however, still apply default or
global markup data to determine if any actions should be taken in
response to the captured data. For example, famous trademarks such as
Microsoft®, Google®, or Amazon® may be included in default
markup data. When the system receives captured information, it will
attempt to identify the rendered document and find markup data that is
most closely associated with the rendered document. If the system fails
to identify the rendered document, it can use the default markup data. By
comparing the captured information to the default markup data, the system
can determine if the information contains the famous trademarks. If so,
the system will perform the action associated with the trademark, such as
providing a hyperlink to the appropriate company home page.

CONCLUSION

[0570]It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the
above-described system may be straightforwardly adapted or extended in
various ways. While the foregoing description makes reference to
particular embodiments, the scope of the invention is defined solely by
the claims that following and the elements recited therein.